CHAPTER I.

Library Edition

THE COMPLETE WORKS

OF

JOHN RUSKIN

MODERN PAINTERS

VOLUME IV--OF MOUNTAIN BEAUTY

/ OF LEAF BEAUTY

VOLUME V < OF CLOUD BEAUTY

\ OF IDEAS OF RELATION

NATIONAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

NEW YORK CHICAGO

MODERN PAINTERS.

VOLUME V.,

COMPLETING THE WORK AND CONTAINING

PARTS

VI. OF LEAF BEAUTY.--VII. OF CLOUD BEAUTY.

VIII. OF IDEAS OF RELATION.

1. OF INVENTION FORMAL.

IX. OF IDEAS OF RELATION.

2. OF INVENTION SPIRITUAL.

PREFACE.

The disproportion, between the length of time occupied in the

preparation of this volume, and the slightness of apparent result, is so

vexatious to me, and must seem so strange to the reader, that he will

perhaps bear with my stating some of the matters which have employed or

interrupted me between 1855 and 1860. I needed rest after finishing the

fourth volume, and did little in the following summer. The winter of

1856 was spent in writing the "Elements of Drawing," for which I thought

there was immediate need; and in examining with more attention than they

deserved some of the modern theories of political economy, to which

there was necessarily reference in my addresses at Manchester. The

Manchester Exhibition then gave me some work, chiefly in its magnificent

Reynolds' constellation; and thence I went on into Scotland, to look at

Dumblane and Jedburgh, and some other favorite sites of Turner's; which

I had not all seen, when I received notice from Mr. Wornum that he had

obtained for me permission, from the Trustees of the National Gallery,

to arrange, as I thought best, the Turner drawings belonging to the

nation; on which I returned to London immediately.

In seven tin boxes in the lower room of the National Gallery I found

upwards of nineteen thousand pieces of paper, drawn upon by Turner in

one way or another. Many on both sides; some with four, five, or six

subjects on each side (the pencil point digging spiritedly through from

the foregrounds of the front into the tender pieces of sky on the back);

some in chalk, which the touch of the finger would sweep away;[1] others

in ink, rotted into holes; others (some splendid colored drawings among

them) long eaten away by damp and mildew, and falling into dust at the

edges, in capes and bays of fragile decay; others worm-eaten, some

mouse-eaten, many torn half-way through; numbers doubled (quadrupled, I

should say) up into four, being Turner's favorite mode of packing for

travelling; nearly all rudely flattened out from the bundles in which

Turner had finally rolled them up and squeezed them into his drawers in

Queen Anne Street. Dust of thirty years' accumulation, black, dense, and

sooty, lay in the rents of the crushed and crumpled edges of these

flattened bundles, looking like a jagged black frame, and producing

altogether unexpected effects in brilliant portions of skies, whence an

accidental or experimental finger mark of the first bundle-unfolder had

swept it away.

About half, or rather more, of the entire number consisted of pencil

sketches, in flat oblong pocket-books, dropping to pieces at the back,

tearing laterally whenever opened, and every drawing rubbing itself into

the one opposite. These first I paged with my own hand; then unbound;

and laid every leaf separately in a clean sheet of perfectly smooth

writing paper, so that it might receive no farther injury. Then,

enclosing the contents and boards of each book (usually ninety-two

leaves, more or less drawn on both sides, with two sketches on the

boards at the beginning and end) in a separate sealed packet, I returned

it to its tin box. The loose sketches needed more trouble. The dust had

first to be got off them (from the chalk ones it could only be blown

off); then they had to be variously flattened; the torn ones to be laid

down, the loveliest guarded, so as to prevent all future friction; and

four hundred of the most characteristic framed and glazed, and cabinets

constructed for them which would admit of their free use by the public.

With two assistants, I was at work all the autumn and winter of 1857,

every day, all day long, and often far into the night.

The manual labor would not have hurt me; but the excitement involved in

seeing unfolded the whole career of Turner's mind during his life,

joined with much sorrow at the state in which nearly all his most

precious work had been left, and with great anxiety, and heavy sense of

responsibility besides, were very trying; and I have never in my life

felt so much exhausted as when I locked the last box, and gave the keys

to Mr. Wornum, in May, 1858. Among the later colored sketches, there was

one magnificent series, which appeared to be of some towns along the

course of the Rhine on the north of Switzerland. Knowing that these

towns were peculiarly liable to be injured by modern railroad works, I

thought I might rest myself by hunting down these Turner subjects, and

sketching what I could of them, in order to illustrate his compositions.

As I expected, the subjects in question were all on, or near, that east

and west reach of the Rhine between Constance and Basle. Most of them

are of Rheinfelden, Seckingen, Lauffenbourg, Schaffhausen, and the Swiss

Baden.

Having made what notes were possible to me of these subjects in the

summer (one or two are used in this volume), I was crossing Lombardy in

order to examine some points of the shepherd character in the Vaudois

valleys, thinking to get my book finished next spring; when I

unexpectedly found some good Paul Veroneses at Turin. There were several

questions respecting the real motives of Venetian work that still

troubled me not a little, and which I had intended to work out in the

Louvre; but seeing that Turin was a good place wherein to keep out of

people's way, I settled there instead, and began with Veronese's Queen

of Sheba;--when, with much consternation, but more delight, I found that

I had never got to the roots of the moral power of the Venetians, and

that they needed still another and a very stern course of study. There

was nothing for it but to give up the book for that year. The winter was

spent mainly in trying to get at the mind of Titian; not a light

winter's task; of which the issue, being in many ways very unexpected to

me (the reader will find it partly told towards the close of this

volume), necessitated my going in the spring to Berlin, to see Titian's

portrait of Lavinia there, and to Dresden to see the Tribute Money, the

elder Lavinia, and girl in white, with the flag fan. Another portrait,

at Dresden, of a lady in a dress of rose and gold, by me unheard of

before, and one of an admiral, at Munich, had like to have kept me in

Germany all summer.

Getting home at last, and having put myself to arrange materials of

which it was not easy, after so much interruption, to recover the

command;--which also were now not reducible to a single volume--two

questions occurred in the outset, one in the section on vegetation,

respecting the origin of wood; the other in the section on sea,

respecting curves of waves; to neither of which, from botanist or

mathematicians, any sufficient answer seemed obtainable.

In other respects also the section on the sea was wholly unsatisfactory

to me: I knew little of ships, nothing of blue open water. Turner's

pathetic interest in the sea, and his inexhaustible knowledge of

shipping, deserved more complete and accurate illustration than was at

all possible to me; and the mathematical difficulty lay at the beginning

of all demonstration of facts. I determined to do this piece of work

well, or not at all, and threw the proposed section out of this volume.

If I ever am able to do what I want with it (and this is barely

probable), it will be a separate book; which, on other accounts, I do

not regret, since many persons might be interested in studies of the

shipping of the old Nelson times, and of the sea-waves and sailor

character of all times, who would not care to encumber themselves with

five volumes of a work on Art.

The vegetation question had, however, at all cost, to be made out as

best might be; and again lost me much time. Many of the results of this

inquiry, also, can only be given, if ever, in a detached form.

During these various discouragements, the preparation of the Plates

could not go on prosperously. Drawing is difficult enough, undertaken in

quietness: it is impossible to bring it to any point of fine rightness

with half-applied energy.

Many experiments were made in hope of expressing Turner's peculiar

execution and touch by facsimile. They cost time, and strength, and, for

the present, have failed; many elaborate drawings, made during the

winter of 1858, having been at last thrown aside. Some good may

afterwards come of these; but certainly not by reduction to the size of

the page of this book, for which, even of smaller subjects, I have not

prepared the most interesting, for I do not wish the possession of any

effective and valuable engravings from Turner to be contingent on the

purchasing a book of mine.[2]

Feebly and faultfully, therefore, yet as well as I can do it under these

discouragements, the book is at last done; respecting the general course

of which, it will be kind and well if the reader will note these few

points that follow.

The first volume was the expansion of a reply to a magazine article; and

was not begun because I then thought myself qualified to write a

systematic treatise on Art; but because I at least knew, and knew it to

be demonstrable, that Turner was right and true, and that his critics

were wrong, false, and base. At that time I had seen much of nature, and

had been several times in Italy, wintering once in Rome; but had chiefly

delighted in northern art, beginning, when a mere boy, with Rubens and

Rembrandt. It was long before I got quit of a boy's veneration for

Rubens' physical art-power; and the reader will, perhaps, on this ground

forgive the strong expressions of admiration for Rubens, which, to my

great regret, occur in the first volume.

Finding myself, however, engaged seriously in the essay, I went, before

writing the second volume, to study in Italy; where the strong reaction

from the influence of Rubens threw me at first too far under that of

Angelico and Raphael, and, which was the worst harm that came of that

Rubens influence, blinded me long to the deepest qualities of Venetian

art; which, the reader may see by expressions occurring not only in the

second, but even in the third and fourth volumes, I thought, however

powerful, yet partly luxurious and sensual, until I was led into the

final inquiries above related.

These oscillations of temper, and progressions of discovery, extending

over a period of seventeen years, ought not to diminish the reader's

confidence in the book. Let him be assured of this, that unless

important changes are occurring in his opinions continually, all his

life long, not one of those opinions can be on any questionable subject

true. All true opinions are living, and show their life by being capable

of nourishment; therefore of change. But their change is that of a

tree--not of a cloud.

In the main aim and principle of the book, there is no variation, from

its first syllable to its last. It declares the perfectness and eternal

beauty of the work of God; and tests all work of man by concurrence

with, or subjection to that. And it differs from most books, and has a

chance of being in some respects better for the difference, in that it

has not been written either for fame, or for money, or for

conscience-sake, but of necessity.

It has not been written for praise. Had I wished to gain present

reputation, by a little flattery adroitly used in some places, a sharp

word or two withheld in others, and the substitution of verbiage

generally for investigation, I could have made the circulation of these

volumes tenfold what it has been in modern society. Had I wished for

future fame, I should have written one volume, not five. Also, it has

not been written for money. In this wealth-producing country, seventeen

years' labor could hardly have been invested with less chance of

equivalent return.

Also, it has not been written for conscience-sake. I had no definite

hope in writing it; still less any sense of its being required of me as

a duty. It seems to me, and seemed always, probable, that I might have

done much more good in some other way. But it has been written of

necessity. I saw an injustice done, and tried to remedy it. I heard

falsehood taught, and was compelled to deny it. Nothing else was

possible to me. I knew not how little or how much might come of the

business, or whether I was fit for it; but here was the lie full set in

front of me, and there was no way round it, but only over it. So that,

as the work changed like a tree, it was also rooted like a tree--not

where it would, but where need was; on which, if any fruit grow such as

you can like, you are welcome to gather it without thanks; and so far as

it is poor or bitter, it will be your justice to refuse it without

reviling.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The best book of studies for his great shipwrecks contained about

a quarter of a pound of chalk débris, black and white, broken off the

crayons with which Turner had drawn furiously on both sides of the

leaves; every leaf, with peculiar foresight and consideration of

difficulties to be met by future mounters, containing half of one

subject on the front of it, and half of another on the back.

[2] To Mr. Armytage, Mr. Cuff, and Mr. Cousen, I have to express my

sincere thanks for the patience, and my sincere admiration of the

skill, with which they have helped me. Their patience, especially,

has been put to severe trial by the rewardless toil required to

produce facsimiles of drawings in which the slightness of subject

could never attract any due notice to the excellence of workmanship.

Aid, just as disinterested, and deserving of as earnest

acknowledgment, has been given me by Miss Byfield, in her faultless

facsimiles of my careless sketches; by Miss O. Hill, who prepared the

copies which I required from portions of the pictures of the old

masters; and by Mr. Robin Allen, in accurate line studies from

nature, of which, though only one is engraved in this volume, many

others have been most serviceable, both to it and to me.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

PART VI.

ON LEAF BEAUTY.

PAGE

PREFACE v

CHAPTER I.--The Earth-Veil 1

" II.--The Leaf Orders 6

" III.--The Bud 10

" IV.--The Leaf 21

" V.--Leaf Aspects 34

" VI.--The Branch 39

" VII.--The Stem 49

" VIII.--The Leaf Monuments 63

" IX.--The Leaf Shadows 77

" X.--Leaves Motionless 88

PART VII.

OF CLOUD BEAUTY.

CHAPTER I.--The Cloud Balancings 101

" II.--The Cloud-Flocks 108

" III.--The Cloud-Chariots 122

" IV.--The Angel of the Sea 133

PART VIII.

OF IDEAS OF RELATION:--I. OF INVENTION FORMAL.

CHAPTER I.--The Law of Help 153

" II.--The Task of the Least 164

" III.--The Rule of the Greatest 175

" IV.--The Law of Perfectness 180

PART IX.

OF IDEAS OF RELATION:--II. OF INVENTION SPIRITUAL.

CHAPTER I.--The Dark Mirror 193

" II.--The Lance of Pallas 202

" III.--The Wings of the Lion 214

" IV.--Durer and Salvator 230

" V.--Claude and Poussin 241

" VI.--Rubens and Cuyp 249

" VII.--Of Vulgarity 261

" VIII.--Wouvermans and Angelico 277

" IX.--The Two Boyhoods 286

" X.--The Nereid's Guard 298

" XI.--The Hesperid Æglé 314

" XII.--Peace 339

LOCAL INDEX.

INDEX TO PAINTERS AND PICTURES.

TOPICAL INDEX.

LIST OF PLATES TO VOL. V.

Drawn by Engraved by

Frontispiece, Ancilla Domini _Fra Angelico_ WM. HALL

Plate Facing page

51. The Dryad's Toil _J. Ruskin_ J. C. ARMYTAGE 12

52. Spirals of Thorn _R. Allen_ R. P. CUFF 26

53. The Dryad's Crown _J. Ruskin_ J. C. ARMYTAGE 36

54. Dutch Leafage _Cuyp and Hobbima_ J. COUSEN 37

55. By the Way-side _J. M. W. Turner_ J. C. ARMYTAGE 38

56. Sketch by a Clerk of the Works _J. Ruskin_ J. EMSLIE 61

57. Leafage by Durer and Veronese _Durer and Veronese_ R. P. CUFF 65

58. Branch Curvature _R. Allen_ R. P. CUFF 69

59. The Dryad's Waywardness _J. Ruskin_ R. P. CUFF 71

60. The Rending of Leaves _J. Ruskin_ J. COUSEN 94

61. Richmond, from the Moors _J. M. W. Turner_ J. C. ARMYTAGE 98

62. By the Brookside _J. M. W. Turner_ J. C. ARMYTAGE 98

63. The Cloud Flocks _J. Ruskin_ J. C. ARMYTAGE 109

64. Cloud Perspective (Rectilinear) _J. Ruskin_ J. EMSLIE 115

65. " " (Curvilinear) _J. Ruskin_ J. EMSLIE 116

66. Light in the West, Beauvais _J. Ruskin_ J. C. ARMYTAGE 121

67. Clouds _J. M. W. Turner_ J. C. ARMYTAGE 118

68. Monte Rosa _J. Ruskin_ J. C. ARMYTAGE 339

69. Aiguilles and their Friends _J. Ruskin_ J. C. ARMYTAGE 125

70. The Graiæ _J. Ruskin_ J. C. ARMYTAGE 127

71. "Venga Medusa" _J. Ruskin_ J. C. ARMYTAGE 127

72. The Locks of Typhon _J. M. W. Turner_ J. C. ARMYTAGE 142

73. Loire Side _J. M. W. Turner_ J. RUSKIN 165

74. The Mill Stream _J. M. W. Turner_ J. RUSKIN 168

75. The Castle of Lauffen _J. M. W. Turner_ R. P. CUFF 169

76. The Moat of Nuremberg _J. Ruskin_ J. H. LE KEUX 233

78. Quivi Trovammo _J. M. W. Turner_ J. RUSKIN 298

79. Hesperid Æglé _Giorgione_ WM. HALL 314

80. Rocks at Rest / _J. Ruskin, from J. M._ \ J. C. ARMYTAGE 319

\ _W. Turner_ /

81. Rocks in Unrest / _J. Ruskin, from J. M._ \ J. C. ARMYTAGE 320

\ _W. Turner_ /

82. The Nets in the Rapids _J. M. W. Turner_ J. H. LE KEUX 336

83. The Bridge of Rheinfelden _J. Ruskin_ J. H. LE KEUX 337

84. Peace _J. Ruskin_ J. H. LE KEUX 338

SEPARATE ENGRAVINGS ON WOOD.

Figure 56, to face page 65

" 61, " 69

" 75 to 78, " 97

" 85, " 118

" 87, " 127

" 88 to 90, " 128

" 98, " 184

" 100, " 284

[Illustration: Ancilla Domini.]

MODERN PAINTERS.

PART VI.

OF LEAF BEAUTY.

CHAPTER I.

THE EARTH-VEIL.

§ 1. "To dress it and to keep it."

That, then, was to be our work. Alas! what work have we set ourselves

upon instead! How have we ravaged the garden instead of kept it--feeding

our war-horses with its flowers, and splintering its trees into

spear-shafts!

"And at the East a flaming sword."

Is its flame quenchless? and are those gates that keep the way indeed

passable no more? or is it not rather that we no more desire to enter?

For what can we conceive of that first Eden which we might not yet win

back, if we chose? It was a place full of flowers, we say. Well: the

flowers are always striving to grow wherever we suffer them; and the

fairer, the closer. There may indeed have been a Fall of Flowers, as a

Fall of Man; but assuredly creatures such as we are can now fancy

nothing lovelier than roses and lilies, which would grow for us side by

side, leaf overlapping leaf, till the Earth was white and red with them,

if we cared to have it so. And Paradise was full of pleasant shades and

fruitful avenues. Well: what hinders us from covering as much of the

world as we like with pleasant shade and pure blossom, and goodly fruit?

Who forbids its valleys to be covered over with corn, till they laugh

and sing? Who prevents its dark forests, ghostly and uninhabitable,

from being changed into infinite orchards, wreathing the hills with

frail-floretted snow, far away to the half-lighted horizon of April, and

flushing the face of all the autumnal earth with glow of clustered food?

But Paradise was a place of peace, we say, and all the animals were

gentle servants to us. Well: the world would yet be a place of peace if

we were all peacemakers, and gentle service should we have of its

creatures if we gave them gentle mastery. But so long as we make sport

of slaying bird and beast, so long as we choose to contend rather with

our fellows than with our faults, and make battlefield of our meadows

instead of pasture--so long, truly, the Flaming Sword will still turn

every way, and the gates of Eden remain barred close enough, till we

have sheathed the sharper flame of our own passions, and broken down the

closer gates of our own hearts.

§ 2. I have been led to see and feel this more and more, as I considered

the service which the flowers and trees, which man was at first

appointed to keep, were intended to render to him in return for his

care; and the services they still render to him, as far as he allows

their influence, or fulfils his own task towards them. For what infinite

wonderfulness there is in this vegetation, considered, as indeed it is,

as the means by which the earth becomes the companion of man--his friend

and his teacher! In the conditions which we have traced in its rocks,

there could only be seen preparation for his existence;--the characters

which enable him to live on it safely, and to work with it easily--in

all these it has been inanimate and passive; but vegetation is to it as

an imperfect soul, given to meet the soul of man. The earth in its

depths must remain dead and cold, incapable except of slow crystalline

change; but at its surface, which human beings look upon and deal with,

it ministers to them through a veil of strange intermediate being; which

breathes, but has no voice; moves, but cannot leave its appointed place;

passes through life without consciousness, to death without bitterness;

wears the beauty of youth, without its passion; and declines to the

weakness of age, without its regret.

§ 3. And in this mystery of intermediate being, entirely subordinate to

us, with which we can deal as we choose, having just the greater power

as we have the less responsibility for our treatment of the unsuffering

creature, most of the pleasures which we need from the external world

are gathered, and most of the lessons we need are written, all kinds of

precious grace and teaching being united in this link between the Earth

and Man: wonderful in universal adaptation to his need, desire, and

discipline; God's daily preparation of the earth for him, with beautiful

means of life. First a carpet to make it soft for him; then, a colored

fantasy of embroidery thereon; then, tall spreading of foliage to shade

him from sunheat, and shade also the fallen rain, that it may not dry

quickly back into the clouds, but stay to nourish the springs among the

moss. Stout wood to bear this leafage: easily to be cut, yet tough and

light, to make houses for him, or instruments (lance-shaft, or

plough-handle, according to his temper); useless it had been, if harder;

useless, if less fibrous; useless, if less elastic. Winter comes, and

the shade of leafage falls away, to let the sun warm the earth; the

strong boughs remain, breaking the strength of winter winds. The seeds

which are to prolong the race, innumerable according to the need, are

made beautiful and palatable, varied into infinitude of appeal to the

fancy of man, or provision for his service: cold juice, or glowing

spice, or balm, or incense, softening oil, preserving resin, medicine of

styptic, febrifuge, or lulling charm: and all these presented in forms

of endless change. Fragility or force, softness and strength, in all

degrees and aspects; unerring uprightness, as of temple pillars, or

undivided wandering of feeble tendrils on the ground; mighty resistances

of rigid arm and limb to the storms of ages, or wavings to and fro with

faintest pulse of summer streamlet. Roots cleaving the strength of rock,

or binding the transience of the sand; crests basking in sunshine of the

desert, or hiding by dripping spring and lightless cave; foliage far

tossing in entangled fields beneath every wave of ocean--clothing with

variegated, everlasting films, the peaks of the trackless mountains, or

ministering at cottage doors to every gentlest passion and simplest joy

of humanity.

§ 4. Being thus prepared for us in all ways, and made beautiful, and

good for food, and for building, and for instruments of our hands, this

race of plants, deserving boundless affection and admiration from us,

become, in proportion to their obtaining it, a nearly perfect test of

our being in right temper of mind and way of life; so that no one can be

far wrong in either who loves the trees enough, and every one is

assuredly wrong in both, who does not love them, if his life has

brought them in his way. It is clearly possible to do without them, for

the great companionship of the sea and sky are all that sailors need;

and many a noble heart has been taught the best it had to learn between

dark stone walls. Still if human life be cast among trees at all, the

love borne to them is a sure test of its purity. And it is a sorrowful

proof of the mistaken ways of the world that the "country," in the

simple sense of a place of fields and trees, has hitherto been the

source of reproach to its inhabitants, and that the words "countryman,"

"rustic," "clown," "paysan," "villager," still signify a rude and

untaught person, as opposed to the words "townsman," and "citizen." We

accept this usage of words, or the evil which it signifies, somewhat too

quietly; as if it were quite necessary and natural that country-people

should be rude, and towns-people gentle. Whereas I believe that the

result of each mode of life may, in some stages of the world's progress,

be the exact reverse; and that another use of words may be forced upon

us by a new aspect of facts, so that we may find ourselves saying: "Such

and such a person is very gentle and kind--he is quite rustic; and such

and such another person is very rude and ill-taught--he is quite

urbane."

§ 5. At all events, cities have hitherto gained the better part of their

good report through our evil ways of going on in the world

generally;--chiefly and eminently through our bad habit of fighting with

each other. No field, in the middle ages, being safe from devastation,

and every country lane yielding easier passage to the marauders,

peacefully-minded men necessarily congregated in cities, and walled

themselves in, making as few cross-country roads as possible: while the

men who sowed and reaped the harvests of Europe were only the servants

or slaves of the barons. The disdain of all agricultural pursuits by the

nobility, and of all plain facts by the monks, kept educated Europe in a

state of mind over which natural phenomena could have no power; body and

intellect being lost in the practice of war without purpose, and the

meditation of words without meaning. Men learned the dexterity with

sword and syllogism, which they mistook for education, within cloister

and tilt-yard; and looked on all the broad space of the world of God

mainly as a place for exercise of horses, or for growth of food.

§ 6. There is a beautiful type of this neglect of the perfectness of the

Earth's beauty, by reason of the passions of men, in that picture of

Paul Uccello's of the battle of Sant' Egidio,[1] in which the armies

meet on a country road beside a hedge of wild roses; the tender red

flowers tossing above the helmets, and glowing between the lowered

lances. For in like manner the whole of Nature only shone hitherto for

man between the tossing of helmet-crests; and sometimes I cannot but

think of the trees of the earth as capable of a kind of sorrow, in that

imperfect life of theirs, as they opened their innocent leaves in the

warm spring-time, in vain for men; and all along the dells of England

her beeches cast their dappled shade only where the outlaw drew his bow,

and the king rode his careless chase; and by the sweet French rivers

their long ranks of poplar waved in the twilight, only to show the

flames of burning cities, on the horizon, through the tracery of their

stems: amidst the fair defiles of the Apennines, the twisted

olive-trunks hid the ambushes of treachery; and on their valley meadows,

day by day, the lilies which were white at the dawn were washed with

crimson at sunset.

§ 7. And indeed I had once purposed, in this work, to show what kind of

evidence existed respecting the possible influence of country life on

men; it seeming to me, then, likely that here and there a reader would

perceive this to be a grave question, more than most which we contend

about, political or social, and might care to follow it out with me

earnestly.

The day will assuredly come when men will see that it is a grave

question; at which period, also, I doubt not, there will arise persons

able to investigate it. For the present, the movements of the world seem

little likely to be influenced by botanical law; or by any other

considerations respecting trees, than the probable price of timber. I

shall limit myself, therefore, to my own simple woodman's work, and try

to hew this book into its final shape, with the limited and humble aim

that I had in beginning it, namely, to prove how far the idle and

peaceable persons, who have hitherto cared about leaves and clouds, have

rightly seen, or faithfully reported of them.

FOOTNOTE:

[1]: In our own National Gallery. It is quaint and imperfect, but of

great interest.

CHAPTER II.

THE LEAF ORDERS.

§ 1. As in our sketch of the structure of mountains it seemed advisable

to adopt a classification of their forms, which, though inconsistent

with absolute scientific precision, was convenient for order of

successive inquiry, and gave useful largeness of view; so, and with yet

stronger reason, in glancing at the first laws of vegetable life, it

will be best to follow an arrangement easily remembered and broadly

true, however incapable of being carried out into entirely consistent

detail. I say, "with yet stronger reason," because more questions are at

issue among botanists than among geologists; a greater number of

classifications have been suggested for plants than for rocks; nor is it

unlikely that those now accepted may be hereafter modified. I take an

arrangement, therefore, involving no theory; serviceable enough for all

working purposes, and sure to remain thus serviceable, in its rough

generality, whatever views may hereafter be developed among botanists.

§ 2. A child's division of plants is into "trees and flowers." If,

however, we were to take him in spring, after he had gathered his lapful

of daisies, from the lawn into the orchard, and ask him how he would

call those wreaths of richer floret, whose frail petals tossed their

foam of promise between him and the sky, he would at once see the need

of some intermediate name, and call them, perhaps, "tree-flowers." If,

then, we took him to a birch-wood, and showed him that catkins were

flowers, as well as cherry-blossoms, he might, with a little help, reach

so far as to divide all flowers into two classes; one, those that grew

on ground; and another, those that grew on trees. The botanist might

smile at such a division; but an artist would not. To him, as the child,

there is something specific and distinctive in those rough trunks that

carry the higher flowers. To him, it makes the main difference between

one plant and another, whether it is to tell as a light upon the ground,

or as a shade upon the sky. And if, after this, we asked for a little

help from the botanist, and he were to lead us, leaving the blossoms, to

look more carefully at leaves and buds, we should find ourselves able in

some sort to justify, even to him, our childish classification. For our

present purposes, justifiable or not, it is the most suggestive and

convenient. Plants are, indeed, broadly referable to two great classes.

The first we may, perhaps, not inexpediently call TENTED PLANTS. They

live in encampments, on the ground, as lilies; or on surfaces of rock,

or stems of other plants, as lichens and mosses. They live--some for a

year, some for many years, some for myriads of years; but, perishing,

they pass as the tented Arab passes; they leave _no memorials of

themselves_, except the seed, or bulb, or root which is to perpetuate

the race.

§ 3. The other great class of plants we may perhaps best call BUILDING

PLANTS. These will not live on the ground, but eagerly raise edifices

above it. Each works hard with solemn forethought all its life.

Perishing, it leaves its work in the form which will be most useful to

its successors--its own monument, and their inheritance. These

architectural edifices we call "Trees."

It may be thought that this nomenclature already involves a theory. But

I care about neither the nomenclature, nor about anything questionable

in my description of the classes. The reader is welcome to give them

what names he likes, and to render what account of them he thinks

fittest. But to us, as artists, or lovers of art, this is the first and

most vital question concerning a plant: "Has it a fixed form or a

changing one? Shall I find it always as I do to-day--this Parnassia

palustris--with one leaf and one flower? or may it some day have

incalculable pomp of leaves and unmeasured treasure of flowers? Will it

rise only to the height of a man--as an ear of corn--and perish like a

man; or will it spread its boughs to the sea and branches to the river,

and enlarge its circle of shade in heaven for a thousand years?"

§ 4. This, I repeat, is the _first_ question I ask the plant. And as it

answers, I range it on one side or the other, among those that rest or

those that toil: tent-dwellers, who toil not, neither do they spin; or

tree-builders, whose days are as the days of the people. I find again,

on farther questioning these plants who rest, that one group of them

does indeed rest always, contentedly, on the ground, but that those of

another group, more ambitious, emulate the builders; and though they

cannot build rightly, raise for themselves pillars out of the remains of

past generations, on which they themselves, living the life of St.

Simeon Stylites, are called, by courtesy, Trees; being, in fact, many of

them (palms, for instance) quite as stately as real trees.[1]

These two classes we might call earth-plants, and pillar-plants.

§ 5. Again, in questioning the true builders as to their modes of work,

I find that they also are divisible into two great classes. Without in

the least wishing the reader to accept the fanciful nomenclature, I

think he may yet most conveniently remember these as "Builders with the

shield," and "Builders with the sword."

Builders with the shield have expanded leaves, more or less resembling

shields, partly in shape, but still more in office; for under their

lifted shadow the young bud of the next year is kept from harm. These

are the gentlest of the builders, and live in pleasant places, providing

food and shelter for man. Builders with the sword, on the contrary, have

sharp leaves in the shape of swords, and the young buds, instead of

being as numerous as the leaves, crouching each under a leaf-shadow, are

few in number, and grow fearlessly, each in the midst of a sheaf of

swords. These builders live in savage places, are sternly dark in color,

and though they give much help to man by their merely physical strength,

they (with few exceptions) give him no food, and imperfect shelter.

Their mode of building is ruder than that of the shield-builders, and

they in many ways resemble the pillar-plants of the opposite order. We

call them generally "Pines."

§ 6. Our work, in this section, will lie only among the shield-builders,

sword-builders, and plants of rest. The Pillar-plants belong, for the

most part, to other climates. I could not analyze them rightly; and the

labor given to them would be comparatively useless for our present

purposes. The chief mystery of vegetation, so far as respects external

form, is among the fair shield-builders. These, at least, we must

examine fondly and earnestly.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] I am not sure that this is a fair account of palms. I have never

had opportunity of studying stems of Endogens, and I cannot

understand the description given of them in books, nor do I know how

far some of their branched conditions approximate to real

tree-structure. If this work, whatever errors it may involve,

provokes the curiosity of the reader so as to lead him to seek for

more and better knowledge, it will do all the service I hope from it.

CHAPTER III.

THE BUD.

§ 1. If you gather in summer time an outer spray of any shield-leaved

tree, you will find it consists of a slender rod, throwing out leaves,

perhaps on every side, perhaps on two sides only, with usually a cluster

of closer leaves at the end. In order to understand its structure, we

must reduce it to a simple general type. Nay, even to a very inaccurate

type. For a tree-branch is essentially a complex thing, and no "simple"

type can, therefore, be a right one.

This type I am going to give you is full of fallacies and inaccuracies;

but out of these fallacies we will bring the truth, by casting them

aside one by one.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.]

§ 2. Let the tree spray be represented under one of these two types, A

or B, Fig. 1, the cluster at the end being in each case supposed to

consist of three leaves only (a most impertinent supposition, for it

must at least have four, only the fourth would be in a puzzling

perspective in A, and hidden behind the central leaf in B). So, receive

this false type patiently. When leaves are set on the stalk one after

another, as in A, they are called "alternate;" when placed as in B,

"opposite." It is necessary you should remember this not very difficult

piece of nomenclature.

If you examine the branch you have gathered, you will see that for some

little way below the full-leaf cluster at the end, the stalk is smooth,

and the leaves are set regularly on it. But at six, eight, or ten inches

down, there comes an awkward knot; something seems to have gone wrong,

perhaps another spray branches off there; at all events, the stem gets

suddenly thicker, and you may break it there (probably) easier than

anywhere else.

That is the junction of two stories of the building. The smooth piece

has all been done this summer. At the knot the foundation was left

during the winter.

The year's work is called a "shoot." I shall be glad if you will break

it off to look at; as my A and B types are supposed to go no farther

down than the knot.

The alternate form A is more frequent than B, and some botanists think

includes B. We will, therefore, begin with it.

§ 3. If you look close at the figure, you will see small projecting

points at the roots of the leaves. These represent buds, which you may

find, most probably, in the shoot you have in your hand. Whether you

find them or not, they are there--visible, or latent, does not matter.

Every leaf has assuredly an infant bud to take care of, laid tenderly,

as in a cradle, just where the leaf-stalk forms a safe niche between it

and the main stem. The child-bud is thus fondly guarded all summer; but

its protecting leaf dies in the autumn; and then the boy-bud is put out

to rough winter-schooling, by which he is prepared for personal entrance

into public life in the spring.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.]

Let us suppose autumn to have come, and the leaves to have fallen. Then

our A of Fig. I, the buds only being left, one for each leaf, will

appear as A B, in Fig. 2. We will call the buds grouped at B, terminal

buds, and those at _a_, _b_, and _c_, lateral buds.

This budded rod is the true year's work of the building plant, at that

part of its edifice. You may consider the little spray, if you like, as

one pinnacle of the tree-cathedral, which has taken a year to fashion;

innumerable other pinnacles having been built at the same time on other

branches.

§ 4. Now, every one of these buds, _a_, _b_, and _c_, as well as every

terminal bud, has the power and disposition to raise himself in the

spring, into just such another pinnacle as A B is.

This development is the process we have mainly to study in this chapter;

but, in the outset, let us see clearly what it is to end in.

[Illustration: FIG. 3.]

Each bud, I said, has the power and disposition to make a pinnacle of

himself, but he has not always the opportunity. What may hinder him we

shall see presently. Meantime, the reader will, perhaps, kindly allow me

to assume that the buds _a_, _b_, and _c_, come to nothing, and only the

three terminal ones build forward. Each of these producing the image of

the first pinnacle, we have the type for our next summer bough of Fig.

3; in which observe the original shoot A B, has become thicker; its

lateral buds having proved abortive, are now only seen as little knobs

on its sides. Its terminal buds have each risen into a new pinnacle. The

central or strongest one B C, has become the very image of what his

parent shoot A B, was last year. The two lateral ones are weaker and

shorter, one probably longer than the other. The joint at B is the knot

or foundation for each shoot above spoken of.

[Illustration: FIG. 4.]

Knowing now what we are about, we will go into closer detail.

[Illustration: 51. The Dryad's Toil.]

§ 5. Let us return to the type in Fig. 2, of the fully accomplished

summer's work: the rod with its bare buds. Plate 51, opposite,

represents, of about half its real size, an outer spray of oak in

winter. It is not growing strongly, and is as simple as possible in

ramification. You may easily see, in each branch, the continuous piece

of shoot produced last year. The wrinkles which make these shoots look

like old branches are caused by drying, as the stalk of a bunch of

raisins is furrowed (the oak-shoot fresh gathered is round as a

grape-stalk). I draw them thus, because the furrows are important clues

to structure. Fig. 4 is the top of one of these oak sprays magnified for

reference. The little brackets, _x_, _y_, &c., which project beneath

each bud and sustain it, are the remains of the leaf-stalks. Those

stalks were jointed at that place, and the leaves fell without leaving a

scar, only a crescent-shaped, somewhat blank-looking flat space, which

you may study at your ease on a horse-chestnut stem, where these spaces

are very large.

§ 6. Now if you cut your oak spray neatly through, just above a bud, as

at A, Fig. 4, and look at it with a not very powerful magnifier, you

will find it present the pretty section, Fig. 5.

[Illustration: FIG. 5.]

That is the proper or normal section of an oak spray. Never quite

regular. Sure to have one of the projections a little larger than the

rest, and to have its bark (the black line) not quite regularly put

round it, but exquisitely finished, down to a little white star in the

very centre, which I have not drawn, because it would look in the

woodcut black, not white; and be too conspicuous.

[Illustration: FIG. 6.]

The oak spray, however, will not keep this form unchanged for an

instant. Cut it through a little way above your first section, and you

will find the largest projection is increasing till, just where it

opens[1] at last into the leaf-stalk, its section is Fig. 6. If,

therefore, you choose to consider every interval between bud and bud as

one story of your tower or pinnacle, you find that there is literally

not a hair's-breadth of the work in which the _plan_ of the tower does

not change. You may see in Plate 51 that every shoot is suffused by a

subtle (in nature an _infinitely_ subtle) change of contour between bud

and bud.

[Illustration: FIG. 7.]

[Illustration: FIG. 8.]

§ 7. But farther, observe in what succession those buds are put round

the bearing stem. Let the section of the stem be represented by the

small central circle in Fig. 8; and suppose it surrounded by a _nearly_

regular pentagon (in the figure it is quite regular for clearness'

sake). Let the first of any ascending series of buds be represented by

the curved projection filling the nearest angle of the pentagon at 1.

Then the next bud, above, will fill the angle at 2; the next above, at

3, the next at 4, the next at 5. The sixth will come nearly over the

first. That is to say, each projecting portion of the section, Fig. 5,

expands into its bud, not successively, but by leaps, always to the

_next but one;_ the buds being thus placed in a nearly regular spiral

order.

§ 8. I say nearly regular--for there are subtleties of variation in plan

which it would be merely tiresome to enter into. All that we need care

about is the general law, of which the oak spray furnishes a striking

example,--that the buds of the first great group of alternate builders

rise in a spiral order round the stem (I believe, for the most part, the

spiral proceeds from right to left). And this spiral succession very

frequently approximates to the pentagonal order, which it takes with

great accuracy in an oak; for, merely assuming that each ascending bud

places itself as far as it can easily out of the way of the one beneath,

and yet not quite on the opposite side of the stem, we find the interval

between the two must generally approximate to that left between 1 and 2,

or 2 and 3, in Fig. 8.[2]

[Illustration: FIG. 9.]

§ 9. Should the interval be consistently a little _less_ than that which

brings out the pentagonal structure, the plant seems to get at first

into much difficulty. For, in such case, there is a probability of the

buds falling into a triangle, as at A, Fig. 9; and then the fourth must

come over the first, which would be inadmissible (we shall soon see

why). Nevertheless, the plant seems to like the triangular result for

its outline, and sets itself to get out of the difficulty with much

ingenuity, by methods of succession, which I will examine farther in the

next chapter: it being enough for us to know at present that the

puzzled, but persevering, vegetable _does_ get out of its difficulty and

issues triumphantly, and with a peculiar expression of leafy exultation,

in a hexagonal star, composed of two distinct triangles, normally as at

B, Fig. 9. Why the buds do not like to be one above the other, we shall

see in next chapter. Meantime I must shortly warn the reader of what we

shall then discover, that, though we have spoken of the projections of

our pentagonal tower as if they were first built to sustain each its

leaf, they are themselves chiefly built by the leaf they seem to

sustain. Without troubling ourselves about this yet, let us fix in our

minds broadly the effective aspect of the matter, which is all we want,

by a simple practical illustration.

§ 10. Take a piece of stick half-an-inch thick, and a yard or two long,

and tie large knots, at any _equal_ distances you choose, on a piece of

pack-thread. Then wind the pack-thread round the stick, with any number

of equidistant turns you choose, from one end to the other, and the

knots will take the position of buds in the general type of alternate

vegetation. By varying the number of knots and the turns of the thread,

you may get the system of any tree, with the exception of one character

only--viz., that since the shoot grows faster at one time than another,

the buds run closer together when the growth is slow. You cannot imitate

this structure by closing the coils of your string, for that would alter

the positions of your knots irregularly. The intervals between the buds

are, by this gradual acceleration or retardation of growth, usually

varied in lovely proportions. Fig. 10 shows the elevations of the buds

on five different sprays of oak; A and B being of the real size (short

shoots); C, D, and E, on a reduced scale. I have not traced the cause

of the apparent tendency of the buds to follow in pairs, in these longer

shoots.

[Illustration: FIG. 10.]

[Illustration: FIG. 11.]

§ 11. Lastly: If the spiral be constructed so as to bring the buds

nearly on opposite sides of the stem, though alternate in succession,

the stem, most probably, will shoot a little away from each bud after

throwing it off, and thus establish the oscillatory form _b_, Fig. 11,

which, when the buds are placed, as in this case, at diminishing

intervals, is very beautiful.[3]

§ 12. I fear this has been a tiresome chapter; but it is necessary to

master the elementary structure, if we are to understand anything of

trees; and the reader will therefore, perhaps, take patience enough to

look at one or two examples of the spray structure of the second great

class of builders, in which the leaves are opposite. Nearly all

opposite-leaved trees grow, normally, like vegetable weathercocks run to

seed, with north and south, and east and west pointers thrown off

alternately one over another, as in Fig. 12.

[Illustration: FIG. 12.]

This, I say, is the normal condition. Under certain circumstances, north

and south pointers set themselves north-east and south-west; this

concession being acknowledged and imitated by the east and west pointers

at the next opportunity; but, for the present, let us keep to our simple

form.

The first business of the budding stem, is to get every pair of buds set

accurately at right angles to the one below. Here are some examples of

the way it contrives this. A, Fig. 13, is the section of the stem of a

spray of box, magnified eight or nine times, just where it throws off

two of its leaves, suppose on north and south sides. The crescents below

and above are sections through the leaf-stalks thrown off on each side.

Just above this joint, the section of the stem is B, which is the normal

section of a box-stem, as Fig. 5 is of an oak's. This, as it ascends,

becomes C, elongating itself now east and west; and the section next to

C, would be again A turned that way; or, taking the succession

completely through two joints, and of the real size, it would be thus:

Fig. 14.

[Illustration: FIG. 13.]

[Illustration: FIG. 14.]

The stem of the spotted aucuba is normally hexagonal, as that of the box

is normally square. It is very dexterous and delicate in its mode of

transformation to the two sides. Through the joint it is A, Fig. 15.

Above joint, B, normal, passing on into C, and D for the next joint.

[Illustration: FIG. 15.]

[Illustration: FIG. 16.]

While in the horse-chestnut, a larger tree, and, as we shall see

hereafter, therefore less regular in conduct, the section, normally

hexagonal, is much rounded and softened into irregularities; A, Fig. 16,

becoming, as it buds, B and C. The dark diamond beside C is a section

through a bud, in which, however small, the quatrefoil disposition is

always seen complete: the four little infant leaves with a queen leaf in

the middle, all laid in their fan-shaped feebleness, safe in a white

cloud of miniature woollen blanket.

§ 13. The elementary structure of all important trees may, I think, thus

be resolved into three principal forms: three-leaved, Fig. 9;

four-leaved, Figs. 13 to 16; and five-leaved, Fig. 8. Or, in well-known

terms, trefoil, quatrefoil, cinqfoil. And these are essential classes,

more complicated forms being usually, it seems to me, resolvable into

these, but these not into each other. The simplest arrangement (Fig.

11), in which the buds are nearly opposite in position, though alternate

in elevation, cannot, I believe, constitute a separate class, being only

an accidental condition of the spiral. If it did, it might be called

difoil; but the important classes are three:--

Trefoil, Fig. 9: Type, Rhododendron.

Quatrefoil, Fig. 13: Type, Horse-chestnut.

Cinqfoil, Fig. 5: Type, Oak.

§ 14. The coincidences between beautiful architecture and the

construction of trees must more and more have become marked in the

reader's mind as we advanced; and if he will now look at what I have

said in other places of the use and meaning of the trefoil, quatrefoil,

and cinqfoil, in Gothic architecture, he will see why I could hardly

help thinking and speaking of all trees as builders. But there is yet

one more subtlety in their way of building which we have not noticed. If

the reader will look carefully at the separate shoots in Plate 51, he

will see that the furrows of the stems fall in almost every case into

continuous spiral curves, carrying the whole system of buds with them.

This superinduced spiral action, of which we shall perhaps presently

discover the cause, often takes place vigorously, producing completely

twisted stems of great thickness. It is nearly always existent slightly,

giving farther grace and change to the whole wonderful structure. And

thus we have, as the final result of one year's vegetative labor on any

single spray, a twisted tower, not similar at any height of its

building: or (for, as we shall see presently, it loses in diameter at

each bud) a twisted spire, correspondent somewhat in principle to the

twisted spire of Dijon, or twisted fountain of Ulm, or twisted shafts of

Verona. Bossed as it ascends with living sculpture, chiselled, not by

diminution but through increase, it rises by one consistent impulse from

its base to its minaret, ready, in spring-time, to throw round it at the

crest at once the radiance of fresh youth and the promise of restoration

after that youth has passed away. A marvellous creation: nay might we

not almost say, a marvellous creature full of prescience in its infancy,

foreboding even, in the earliest gladness of its opening to sunshine,

the hour of fainting strength and falling leaf, and guarding under the

shade of its faithful shields the bud that is to bear its hope through

winter's shieldless sleep?

Men often look to bring about great results by violent and unprepared

effort. But it is only in fair and forecast order, "as the earth

bringeth forth her bud," that righteousness and praise may spring forth

before the nations.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The added portion, surrounding two of the sides of the pentagon,

is the preparation for the stalk of the leaf, which, on detaching

itself from the stem, presents variable sections, of which those

numbered 1 to 4, Fig. 7, are examples. I cannot determine the proper

normal form. The bulb-shaped spot in the heart of the uppermost of

the five projections in Fig. 6 is the root of the bud.

[2] For more accurate information the reader may consult Professor

Lindley's _Introduction to Botany_ (Longman, 1848), vol. i. p. 245,

_et seqq._

[3] Fig. 11 is a shoot of the line, drawn on two sides, to show its

continuous curve in one direction, and alternated curves in another.

The buds, which may be seen to be at equal heights in the two

figures, are exquisitely proportioned in their distances. There is no

end to the refinement of system, if we choose to pursue it.

CHAPTER IV.

THE LEAF.

§ 1. Having now some clear idea of the position of the bud, we have next

to examine the forms and structure of its shield--the leaf which guards

it. You will form the best general idea of the flattened leaf of

shield-builders by thinking of it as you would of a mast and sail. More

consistently with our classification, we might perhaps say, by thinking

always of the arm sustaining the shield; but we should be in danger of

carrying fancy too far, and the likeness of mast and sail is closer, for

the mast tapers as the leaf-rib does, while the hand holding the

uppermost strap of the buckler clenches itself. Whichever figure we use,

it will cure us of the bad habit of imagining a leaf composed of a short

stalk with a broad expansion at the end of it. Whereas we should always

think of the stalk as running right up the leaf to its point, and

carrying the expanded, or foliate part, as the mast of a lugger does its

sail. To some extent, indeed, it has yards also, ribs branching from the

innermost one; only the yards of the leaf will not run up and down,

which is one essential function of a sailyard.

§ 2. The analogy will, however, serve one step more. As the sail must be

on one side of the mast, so the expansion of a leaf is on one side of

its central rib, or of its system of ribs. It is laid over them as if it

were stretched over a frame, so that on the upper surface it is

comparatively smooth; on the lower, barred. The understanding of the

broad relations of these parts is the principal work we have to do in

this chapter.

§ 3. First, then, you may roughly assume that the section of any

leaf-mast will be a crescent, as at _a_, Fig. 17 (compare Fig. 7 above).

The flat side is the uppermost, the round side underneath, and the flat

or upper side caries the leaf. You can at once see the convenience of

this structure for fitting to a central stem. Suppose the central stem

has a little hole in the centre, _b_, Fig. 17, and that you cut it down

through the middle (as terrible knights used to cut their enemies in the

dark ages, so that half the head fell on one side, and half on the

other): Pull the two halves separate, _c_, and they will nearly

represent the shape and position of opposite leaf-ribs. In reality the

leaf-stalks have to fit themselves to the central stem, _a_, and as we

shall see presently, to lap round it: but we must not go too fast.

[Illustration: FIG. 17.]

[Illustration: FIG. 18.]

[Illustration: FIG. 19.]

§ 4. Now, _a_, Fig. 17, being the general type of a leaf-stalk, Fig. 18

is the general type of the way it expands into and carries its leaf;[1]

this figure being the enlargement of a typical section right across any

leaf, the dotted lines show the under surface foreshortened. You see I

have made one side broader than the other. I mean that. It is typically

so. Nature cannot endure two sides of a leaf to be alike. By encouraging

one side more than the other, either by giving it more air or light, or

perhaps in a chief degree by the mere fact of the moisture necessarily

accumulating on the lower edge when it rains, and the other always

drying first, she contrives it so, that if the essential form or idea of

the leaf be _a_, Fig. 19, the actual form will always be _c_, or an

approximate to it; one half being pushed in advance of the other, as at

_b_, and all reconciled by soft curvature, _c_. The effort of the leaf

to keep itself symmetrical rights it, however, often at the point, so

that the insertion of the stalk only makes the inequality manifest. But

it follows that the sides of a straight section across the leaf are

unequal all the way up, as in my drawing, except at one point.

[Illustration: FIG. 20.]

§ 5. I have represented the two wings of the leaf as slightly convex on

the upper surface. This is also on the whole a typical character. I use

the expression "wings of the leaf," because supposing we exaggerate the

main rib a little, the section will generally resemble a bad painter's

type of a bird (_a_, Fig. 20). Sometimes the outer edges curl up, _b_,

but an entirely concave form, _c_, is rare. When _b_ is strongly

developed, closing well in, the leaf gets a good deal the look of a boat

with a keel.

[Illustration: FIG. 21.]

§ 6. If now you take this oblique form of sail, and cut it into any

number of required pieces down to its mast, as in Fig. 21, A, and then

suppose each of the pieces to contract into studding-sails at the side,

you will have whatever type of divided leaf you choose to shape it for.

In Fig. 21, A, B, I have taken the rose as the simplest type. The leaf

is given in separate contour at C; but that of the mountain ash, A,

Fig. 22, suggests the original oval form which encloses all the

subdivisions much more beautifully. Each of the studding-sails in this

ash-leaf looks much at first as if he were himself a mainsail. But you

may know him always to be a subordinate, by observing that the

inequality of the two sides which is brought about by accidental

influences in the mainsail, is an organic law in the studding-sail. The

real leaf tries to set itself evenly on its mast; and the inequality is

only a graceful concession to circumstances. But the subordinate or

studding-sail is always _by law_ larger at one side than the other; and

if he is himself again divided into smaller sails, he will have larger

sails on the lowest side, or one more sail on the lowest side, than he

has on the other. He always wears, therefore, a servant's, or, at least,

subordinate's dress. You may know him anywhere as not the master. Even

in the ash leaflet, of which I have outlined one separately, B, Fig. 22,

this is clearly seen; but it is much more distinct in more finely

divided leaves.[2]

[Illustration: FIG. 22]

§ 7. Observe, then, that leaves are broadly divisible into mainsails and

studding-sails; but that the word _leaf_ is properly to be used only of

the mainsail; leaflet is the best word for minor divisions; and whether

these minor members are only separated by deep cuts, or become complete

stalked leaflets, still they are always to be thought of merely as parts

of a true leaf.

It follows from the mode of their construction that leaflets must always

lie more or less _flat_, or edge to edge, in a continuous plane. This

position distinguishes them from true leaves as much as their oblique

form, and distinguishes them with the same delicate likeness of system;

for as the true leaf takes, accidentally and partially, the oblique

outline which is legally required in the subordinate, so the true leaf

takes accidentally and partially the flat disposition which is legally

required in the subordinate. And this point of position we must now

study. Henceforward, throughout this chapter, the reader will please

note that I speak only of true _leaves_, not of _leaflets_.

[Illustration: FIG. 23.]

§ 8. LAW I. THE LAW OF DEFLECTION.--The first law, then, respecting

position in true leaves, is that they fall gradually back from the

uppermost one, or uppermost group. They are never set as at _a_, Fig.

23, but always as at _b_. The reader may see at once that they have more

room and comfort by means of the latter arrangement. The law is carried

out with more or less distinctness according to the habit of the plant;

but is always acknowledged.

[Illustration: FIG. 24.]

In strong-leaved shrubs or trees it is shown with great distinctness and

beauty: the phillyrea shoot, for instance, Fig. 24, is almost in as true

symmetry as a Greek honeysuckle ornament. In the hawthorn shoot,

central in Plate 52, opposite, the law is seen very slightly, yet it

rules all the play and fantasy of the varied leaves, gradually

depressing their lines as they are set lower. In crowded foliage of

large trees the disposition of each separate leaf is not so manifest.

For there is a strange coincidence in this between trees and communities

of men. When the community is small, people fall more easily into their

places, and take, each in his place, a firmer standing than can be

obtained by the individuals of a great nation. The members of a vast

community are separately weaker, as an aspen or elm leaf is thin,

tremulous, and directionless, compared with the spear-like setting and

firm substance of a rhododendron or laurel leaf. The laurel and

rhododendron are like the Athenian or Florentine republics; the aspen

like England--strong-trunked enough when put to proof, and very good for

making cartwheels of, but shaking pale with epidemic panic at every

breeze. Nevertheless, the aspen has the better of the great nation, in

that if you take it bough by bough, you shall find the gentle law of

respect and room for each other truly observed by the leaves in such

broken way as they can manage it; but in the nation you find every one

scrambling for his neighbor's place.

This, then, is our first law, which we may generally call the Law of

Deflection; or, if the position of the leaves with respect to the root

be regarded, of Radiation. The second is more curious, and we must go

back over our ground a little to get at it.

[Illustration: 52. Spirals of Thorn.]

§ 9. LAW II. THE LAW OF SUCCESSION.--From what we saw of the position of

buds, it follows that in every tree the leaves at the end of the spray,

taking the direction given them by the uppermost cycle or spiral of the

buds, will fall naturally into a starry group, expressive of the order

of their growth. In an oak we shall have a cluster of five leaves, in a

horse-chestnut of four, in a rhododendron of six, and so on. But

observe, if we draw the oak-leaves all equal, as at _a_, Fig. 25, or the

chestnut's (_b_), or the rhododendron's (_c_), you instantly will feel,

or ought to feel, that something is wrong; that those are not foliage

forms--not even normally or typically so--but dead forms, like crystals

of snow. Considering this, and looking back to last chapter, you will

see that the buds which throw out these leaves do not grow side by side,

but one above another. In the oak and rhododendron, all five and all

six buds are at different heights; in the chestnut, one couple is above

the other couple.

[Illustration: FIG. 25.]

§ 10. Now so surely as one bud is above another, it must be stronger or

weaker than that other. The shoot may either be increasing in strength

as it advances, or declining; in either case, the buds must vary in

power, and the leaves in size. At the top of the shoot, the last or

uppermost leaves are mostly the smallest; of course always so in spring

as they develope.

[Illustration: FIG. 26.]

Let us then apply these conditions to our formal figure above, and

suppose each leaf to be weaker in its order of succession. The oak

becomes as _a_, Fig. 26, the chestnut shoot as _b_, the rhododendron,

_c_. These, I should think, it can hardly be necessary to tell the

reader, are true normal forms;--respecting which one or two points must

be noticed in detail.

§ 11. The magnitude of the leaves in the oak star diminishes, of course,

in alternate order. The largest leaf is the lowest, 1 in Figure 8, p.

14. While the largest leaf forms the bottom, next it, opposite each

other, come the third and fourth, in order and magnitude, and the fifth

and second form the top. An oak star is, therefore, always an oblique

star; but in the chestnut and other quatrefoil trees, though the

uppermost couple of leaves must always be smaller than the lowermost

couple, there appears no geometrical reason why the opposite leaves of

each couple should vary in size. Nevertheless, they always do, so that

the quatrefoil becomes oblique as well as the cinqfoil, as you see it is

in Fig. 26.

[Illustration: FIG. 27.]

[Illustration: FIG. 28.]

The normal of four-foils is therefore as in Fig. 27, A (maple): with

magnitudes, in order numbered; but it often happens that an opposite

pair agree to become largest and smallest; thus giving the pretty

symmetry, Fig. 27, B (spotted aucuba). Of course the quatrefoil in

reality is always less formal, one pair of leaves more or less hiding or

preceding the other. Fig. 28 is the outline of a young one in the maple.

[Illustration: FIG. 29.]

§ 12. The third form is more complex, and we must take the pains to

follow out what we left unobserved in last chapter respecting the way a

triplicate plant gets out of its difficulties.

Draw a circle as in Fig. 29, and two lines, AB, BC, touching it, equal

to each other, and each divided accurately in half where they touch the

circle, so that AP shall be equal to PB, BQ, and QC. And let the lines

AB and BC be so placed that a dotted line AC, joining their extremities,

would not be much longer than either of them.

[Illustration: FIG. 30.]

Continue to draw lines of the same length all round the circle. Lay five

of them, AB, BC, CD, DE, EF. Then join the points AD, EB, and CF, and

you have Fig. 30, which is a hexagon, with the following curious

properties. It has one side largest, CD, two sides less, but equal to

each other, AE and BF; and three sides less still, and equal to each

other, AD, CF, and BE.

[Illustration: FIG. 31.]

[Illustration: FIG. 32.]

Now put leaves into this hexagon, Fig. 31, and you will see how

charmingly the rhododendron has got out of its difficulties. The next

cycle will put a leaf in at the gap at the top, and begin a new hexagon.

Observe, however, this geometrical figure is only to the rhododendron

what the _a_ in Fig. 25 is to the oak, the icy or dead form. To get the

living normal form we must introduce our law of succession. That is to

say, the five lines A B, B C, &c., must continually diminish, as they

proceed, and therefore continually approach the centre; roughly, as in

Fig. 32.

[Illustration: FIG. 33.]

§ 13. I dread entering into the finer properties of this construction,

but the reader cannot now fail to feel their beautiful result either in

the cluster in Fig. 26, or here in Fig. 33, which is a richer and more

oblique one. The three leaves of the uppermost triad are perfectly seen,

closing over the bud; and the general form is clear, though the lower

triads are confused to the eye by unequal development, as in these

complex arrangements is almost always the case. The more difficulties

are to be encountered the more licence is given to the plant in dealing

with them, and we shall hardly ever find a rhododendron shoot fulfilling

its splendid spiral as an oak does its simple one.

Here, for instance, is the actual order of ascending leaves in four

rhododendron shoots which I gather at random.

[Illustration: FIG. 34.]

Of these, A is the only quite well-conducted one; B takes one short

step, C, one step backwards, and D, two steps back and one, too short,

forward.

[Illustration: FIG. 35.]

§ 14. LAW III. THE LAW OF RESILIENCE.--If you have been gathering any

branches from the trees I have named among quatrefoils (the box is the

best for exemplification), you have perhaps been embarrassed by finding

that the leaves, instead of growing on four sides of the stem, did

practically grow oppositely on two. But if you look closely at the

places of their insertion, you will find they indeed spring on all four

sides; and that in order to take the flattened opposite position, each

leaf twists round on its stalk, as in Fig. 35, which represents a

box-leaf magnified and foreshortened. The leaves do this in order to

avoid growing downwards, where the position of the bough and bud would,

if the leaves regularly kept their places, involve downward growth. The

leaves always rise up on each side from beneath, and form a flattened

group, more or less distinctly in proportion to the horizontality of the

bough, and the contiguity of foliage below and above. I shall not

trouble myself to illustrate this law, as you have only to gather a few

tree-sprays to see its effect. But you must note the resulting

characters on _every_ leaf; namely, that not one leaf in a thousand

grows without a fixed turn in its stalk; warping and varying the whole

of the curve on the two edges, throughout its length, and thus producing

the loveliest conditions of its form. We shall presently trace the law

of resilience farther on a larger scale: meanwhile, in summing the

results of our inquiry thus far, let us remember that every one of these

laws is observed with varying accuracy and gentle equity, according not

only to the strength and fellowship of foliage on the spray itself, but

according to the place and circumstances of its growth.

§ 15. For the leaves, as we shall see immediately, are the feeders of

the plant. Their own orderly habits of succession must not interfere

with their main business of finding food. Where the sun and air are, the

leaf must go, whether it be out of order or not. So, therefore, in any

group, the first consideration with the young leaves is much like that

of young bees, how to keep out of each other's way, that every one may

at once leave its neighbors as much free-air pasture as possible, and

obtain a relative freedom for itself. This would be a quite simple

matter, and produce other simply balanced forms, if each branch, with

open air all round it, had nothing to think of but reconcilement of

interests among its own leaves. But every branch has others to meet or

to cross, sharing with them, in various advantage, what shade, or sun,

or rain is to be had. Hence every single leaf-cluster presents the

general aspect of a little family, entirely at unity among themselves,

but obliged to get their living by various shifts, concessions, and

infringements of the family rules, in order not to invade the privileges

of other people in their neighborhood.

§ 16. And in the arrangement of these concessions there is an exquisite

sensibility among the leaves. They do not grow each to his own liking,

till they run against one another, and then turn back sulkily; but by a

watchful instinct, far apart, they anticipate their companions' courses,

as ships at sea, and in every new unfolding of their edged tissue, guide

themselves by the sense of each other's remote presence, and by a

watchful penetration of leafy purpose in the far future. So that every

shadow which one casts on the next, and every glint of sun which each

reflects to the next, and every touch which in toss of storm each

receives from the next, aid or arrest the development of their advancing

form, and direct, as will be safest and best, the curve of every fold

and the current of every vein.

§ 17. And this peculiar character exists in all the structures thus

developed, that they are always visibly the result of a volition on the

part of the leaf, meeting an external force or fate, to which it is

never passively subjected. Upon it, as on a mineral in the course of

formation, the great merciless influences of the universe, and the

oppressive powers of minor things immediately near it, act continually.

Heat and cold, gravity and the other attractions, windy pressure, or

local and unhealthy restraint, must, in certain inevitable degrees,

affect the whole of its life. But it is _life_ which they affect;--a

life of progress and will,--not a merely passive accumulation of

substance. This may be seen by a single glance. The mineral,--suppose an

agate in the course of formation--shows in every line nothing but a dead

submission to surrounding force. Flowing, or congealing, its substance

is here repelled, there attracted, unresistingly to its place, and its

languid sinuosities follow the clefts of the rock that contains them, in

servile deflexion and compulsory cohesion, impotently calculable, and

cold. But the leaf, full of fears and affections, shrinks and seeks, as

it obeys. Not thrust, but awed into its retiring; not dragged, but won

to its advance; not bent aside, as by a bridle, into new courses of

growth: but persuaded and converted through tender continuance of

voluntary change.

§ 18. The mineral and it differing thus widely in separate being, they

differ no less in modes of companionship. The mineral crystals group

themselves neither in succession, nor in sympathy; but great and small

recklessly strive for place, and deface or distort each other as they

gather into opponent asperities. The confused crowd fills the rock

cavity, hanging together in a glittering, yet sordid heap, in which

nearly every crystal, owing to their vain contention, is imperfect, or

impure. Here and there one, at the cost and in defiance of the rest,

rises into unwarped shape or unstained clearness. But the order of the

leaves is one of soft and subdued concession. Patiently each awaits its

appointed time, accepts its prepared place, yields its required

observance. Under every oppression of external accident, the group yet

follows a law laid down in its own heart; and all the members of it,

whether in sickness or health, in strength or languor, combine to carry

out this first and last heart law; receiving, and seeming to desire for

themselves and for each other, only life which they may communicate, and

loveliness which they may reflect.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] I believe the undermost of the two divisions of the leaf

represents vegetable tissue _returning_ from the extremity. See

Lindley's _Introduction to Botany_ (1848), vol. i. p. 253.

[2] For farther notes on this subject, see my _Elements of Drawing_,

p. 286.

CHAPTER V.

LEAF ASPECTS.

§ 1. Before following farther our inquiry into tree structure, it will

rest us, and perhaps forward our work a little, to make some use of what

we know already.

It results generally from what we have seen that any group of four or

five leaves presenting itself in its natural position to the eye,

consists of a series of forms connected by exquisite and complex

symmetries, and that these forms will be not only varied in themselves,

but every one of them seen under a different condition of

foreshortening.

The facility of drawing the group may be judged of by a comparison.

Suppose five or six boats, very beautifully built, and sharp in the

prow, to start all from one point, and the first bearing up into the

wind, the other three or four to fall off from it in succession an equal

number of points,[1] taking each, in consequence, a different slope of

deck from the stem of the sail. Suppose, also, that the bows of these

boats were transparent, so that you could see the under sides of their

decks as well as the upper;--and that it were required of you to draw

all their five decks, the under or upper side, as their curve showed it,

in true foreshortened perspective, indicating the exact distance each

boat had reached at a given moment from the central point they started

from.

If you can do that, you can draw a rose-leaf. Not otherwise.

§ 2. When, some few years ago, the pre-Raphaelites began to lead our

wandering artists back into the eternal paths of all great Art, and

showed that whatever men drew at all, ought to be drawn accurately and

knowingly; not blunderingly nor by guess (leaves of trees among other

things): as ignorant pride on the one hand refused their teaching,

ignorant hope caught at it on the other. "What!" said many a feeble

young student to himself. "Painting is not a matter of science then, nor

of supreme skill, nor of inventive brain. I have only to go and paint

the leaves of the trees as they grow, and I shall produce beautiful

landscapes directly."

Alas! my innocent young friend. "Paint the leaves as they grow!" If you

can paint _one_ leaf, you can paint the world. These pre-Raphaelite

laws, which you think so light, lay stern on the strength of Apelles and

Zeuxis; put Titian to thoughtful trouble; are unrelaxed yet, and

unrelaxable for ever. Paint a leaf indeed! Above-named Titian has done

it: Correggio, moreover, and Giorgione: and Leonardo, very nearly,

trying hard. Holbein, three or four times, in precious pieces, highest

wrought. Raphael, it may be, in one or two crowns of Muse or Sibyl. If

any one else, in later times, we have to consider.

§ 3. At least until recently, the perception of organic leaf form was

absolutely, in all painters whatsoever, proportionate to their power of

drawing the human figure. All the great Italian designers drew leaves

thoroughly well, though none quite so fondly as Correggio. Rubens drew

them coarsely and vigorously, just as he drew limbs. Among the inferior

Dutch painters, the leaf-painting degenerates in proportion to the

diminishing power in figure. Cuyp, Wouvermans, and Paul Potter, paint

better foliage than either Hobbima or Ruysdael.

§ 4. In like manner the power of treating vegetation in sculpture is

absolutely commensurate with nobleness of figure design. The quantity,

richness, or deceptive finish may be greater in third-rate work; but in

true understanding and force of arrangement the leaf and the human

figure show always parallel skill. The leaf-mouldings of Lorenzo

Ghiberti are unrivalled, as his bas-reliefs are, and the severe foliage

of the Cathedral of Chartres is as grand as its queen-statues.

§ 5. The greatest draughtsmen draw leaves, like everything else, of

their full-life size in the nearest part of the picture. They cannot be

rightly drawn on any other terms. It is impossible to reduce a group so

treated without losing much of its character; and more painfully

impossible to represent by engraving any good workman's handling. I

intended to have inserted in this place an engraving of the cluster of

oak-leaves above Correggio's Antiope in the Louvre, but it is too

lovely; and if I am able to engrave it at all, it must be separately,

and of its own size. So I draw, roughly, instead, a group of oak-leaves

on a young shoot, a little curled with autumn frost: Plate 53. I could

not draw them accurately enough if I drew them in spring. They would

droop and lose their relations. Thus roughly drawn, and losing some of

their grace, by withering, they, nevertheless, have enough left to show

how noble leaf-form is; and to prove, it seems to me, that Dutch

draughtsmen do not wholly express it. For instance, Fig. 3, Plate 54, is

a facsimile of a bit of the nearest oak foliage out of Hobbima's Scene

with the Water-mill, No. 131, in the Dulwich Gallery. Compared with the

real forms of oak-leaf, in Plate 53, it may, I hope, at least enable my

readers to understand, if they choose, why, never having ceased to rate

the Dutch painters for their meanness or minuteness, I yet accepted the

leaf-painting of the pre-Raphaelites with reverence and hope.

[Illustration: 53. The Dryad's Crown.]

[Illustration: 54. Dutch Leafage.]

§ 6. No word has been more harmfully misused than that ugly one of

"niggling." I should be glad if it were entirely banished from service

and record. The only essential question about drawing is whether it be

right or wrong; that it be small or large, swift or slow, is a matter of

convenience only. But so far as the word may be legitimately used at

all, it belongs especially to such execution as this of

Hobbima's--execution which substitutes, on whatever scale, a mechanical

trick or habit of hand for true drawing of known or intended forms. So

long as the work is thoughtfully directed, there is no niggling. In a

small Greek coin the muscles of the human body are as grandly treated as

in a colossal statue; and a fine vignette of Turner's will show separate

touches often more extended in intention, and stronger in result, than

those of his largest oil pictures. In the vignette of the picture of

Ginevra, at page 90 of Roger's Italy, the forefinger touching the lip is

entirely and rightly drawn, bent at the two joints, within the length of

the thirtieth of an inch, and the whole hand within the space of one of

those "niggling" touches of Hobbima. But if this work were magnified, it

would be seen to be a strong and simple expression of a hand by thick

black lines.

§ 7. Niggling, therefore, essentially means disorganized and mechanical

work, applied on a scale which may deceive a vulgar or ignorant person

into the idea of its being true:--a definition applicable to the whole

of the leaf-painting of the Dutch landscapists in distant effect, and

for the most part to that of their near subjects also. Cuyp and

Wouvermans, as before stated, and others, in proportion to their power

over the figure, drew leaves better in the foreground, yet never

altogether well; for though Cuyp often draws a single leaf carefully

(weedy ground-vegetation especially, with great truth), he never felt

the connection of leaves, but scattered them on the boughs at random.

Fig. 1 in Plate 54 is nearly a _facsimile_ of part of the branch on the

left side in our National Gallery picture. Its entire want of grace and

organization ought to be felt at a glance, after the work we have gone

through. The average conditions of leafage-painting among the Dutch are

better represented by Fig. 2, Plate 54, which is a piece of the foliage

from the Cuyp in the Dulwich Gallery, No. 163. It is merely wrought with

a mechanical play of brush in a well-trained hand, gradating the color

irregularly and agreeably, but with no more feeling or knowledge of

leafage than a paperstainer shows in graining a pattern. A bit of the

stalk is seen on the left; it might just as well have been on the other

side, for any connection the leaves have with it. As the leafage retires

into distance, the Dutch painters merely diminish their _scale_ of

touch. The touch itself remains the same, but its effect is falser; for

though the separate stains or blots in Fig. 2, do not rightly represent

the forms of leaves, they may not inaccurately represent the number of

leaves on that spray. But in distance, when, instead of one spray, we

have thousands in sight, no human industry, nor possible diminution of

touch can represent their mist of foliage, and the Dutch work becomes

doubly base, by reason of false form, and lost infinity.

§ 8. Hence what I said in our first inquiry about foliage, "A single

dusty roll of Turner's brush is more truly expressive of the infinitude

of foliage than the niggling of Hobbima could have rendered his canvas,

if he had worked on it till doomsday." And this brings me to the main

difficulty I have had in preparing this section. That infinitude of

Turner's execution attaches not only to his distant work, but in due

degree to the nearest pieces of his trees. As I have shown in the

chapter on mystery, he perfected the system of art, as applicable to

landscape, by the introduction of this infiniteness. In other qualities

he is often only equal, in some inferior, to great preceding painters;

but in this mystery he stands alone. He could not paint a cluster of

leaves better than Titian; but he could a bough, much more a distant

mass of foliage. No man ever before painted a distant tree rightly, or a

full-leaved branch rightly. All Titian's distant branches are ponderous

flakes, as if covered with seaweed, while Veronese's and Raphael's are

conventional, being exquisitely ornamental arrangements of small perfect

leaves. See the background of the Parnassus in Volpato's plate. It is

very lovely, however.

[Illustration: 55. By the Way-side.]

§ 9. But this peculiar execution of Turner's is entirely uncopiable;

least of all to be copied in engraving. It is at once so dexterous and

so keenly cunning, swiftest play of hand being applied with concentrated

attention on every movement, that no care in facsimile will render it.

The delay in the conclusion of this work has been partly caused by the

failure of repeated attempts to express this execution. I see my way now

to some partial result; but must get the writing done, and give

undivided care to it before I attempt to produce costly plates.

Meanwhile, the little cluster of foliage opposite, from the thicket

which runs up the bank on the right-hand side of the drawing of

Richmond, looking up the river, in the Yorkshire series, will give the

reader some idea of the mingled definiteness and mystery of Turner's

work, as opposed to the mechanism of the Dutch on the one side, and the

conventional severity of the Italians on the other. It should be

compared with the published engraving in the Yorkshire series; for just

as much increase, both in quantity and refinement, would be necessary in

every portion of the picture, before any true conception could be given

of the richness of Turner's designs. A fragment of distant foliage I may

give farther on; but, in order to judge rightly of either example, we

must know one or two points in the structure of branches, requiring yet

some irksome patience of inquiry, which I am compelled to ask the reader

to grant me through another two chapters.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] I don't know that this is rightly expressed; but the meaning will

be understood.

CHAPTER VI.

THE BRANCH.

§ 1. We have hitherto spoken of each shoot as either straight or only

warped by its spiral tendency; but no shoot of any length, except those

of the sapling, ever can be straight; for, as the family of leaves which

it bears are forced unanimously to take some given direction in search

of food or light, the stalk necessarily obeys the same impulse, and

bends itself so as to sustain them in their adopted position, with the

greatest ease to itself and comfort for them.

In doing this, it has two main influences to comply or contend with: the

first, the direct action of the leaves in drawing it this way or that,

as they themselves seek particular situations; the second, the pressure

of their absolute weight after they have taken their places, depressing

each bough in a given degree; the leverage increasing as the leaf

extends. To these principal forces may frequently be added that of some

prevalent wind, which, on a majority of days in the year, bends the

bough, leaves and all, for hours together, out of its normal position.

Owing to these three forces, the shoot is nearly sure to be curved in at

least two directions;[1] that is to say, not merely as the rim of a

wine-glass is curved (so that, looking at it horizontally, the circle

becomes a straight line), but as the edge of a lip or an eyebrow is

curved, partly upward, partly forwards, so that in no possible

perspective can it be seen as a straight line. Similarly, no perspective

will usually bring a shoot of a free-growing tree to appear a straight

line.

§ 2. It is evident that the more leaves the stalk has to sustain, the

more strength it requires. It might appear, therefore, not unadvisable,

that every leaf should, as it grew, pay a small tax to the stalk for its

sustenance; so that there might be no fear of any number of leaves being

too oppressive to their bearer. Which, accordingly, is just what the

leaves do. Each, from the moment of his complete majority, pays a stated

tax to the stalk; that is to say, collects for it a certain quantity of

wood, or materials for wood, and sends this wood, or what ultimately

will become wood, _down_ the stalk to add to its thickness.

§ 3. "Down the stalk?" yes, and down a great way farther. For, as the

leaves, if they did not thus contribute to their own support, would soon

be too heavy for the spray, so if the spray, with its family of leaves,

contributed nothing to the thickness of the branch, the leaf-families

would soon break down their sustaining branches. And, similarly, if the

branches gave nothing to the stem, the stem would soon fall under its

boughs. Therefore, by a power of which I believe no sufficient account

exists,[2] as each leaf adds to the thickness of the shoot, so each

shoot to the branch, so each branch to the stem, and that with so

perfect an order and regularity of duty, that from every leaf in all the

countless crowd at the tree's summit, one slender fibre, or at least

fibre's thickness of wood, descends through shoot, through spray,

through branch, and through stem; and having thus added, in its due

proportion, to form the strength of the tree, labors yet farther and

more painfully to provide for its security; and thrusting forward into

the root, loses nothing of its mighty energy, until, mining through the

darkness, it has taken hold in cleft of rock or depth of earth, as

extended as the sweep of its green crest in the free air.

§ 4. Such, at least, is the mechanical aspect of the tree. The work of

its construction, considered as a branch tower, partly propped by

buttresses, partly lashed by cables, is thus shared in by every leaf.

But considering it as a living body to be nourished, it is probably an

inaccurate analogy to speak of the leaves being taxed for the

enlargement of the trunk. Strictly speaking, the trunk enlarges by

sustaining them. For each leaf, however far removed from the ground,

stands in need of nourishment derived from the ground, as well as of

that which it finds in the air; and it simply sends its root down along

the stem of the tree, until it reaches the ground and obtains the

necessary mineral elements. The trunk has been therefore called by some

botanists a "bundle of roots," but I think inaccurately. It is rather a

messenger to the roots.[3] A root, properly so called, is a fibre,

spongy or absorbent at the extremity, which secretes certain elements

from the earth. The stem is by this definition no more a cluster of

roots than a cluster of leaves, but a channel of intercourse between the

roots and the leaves. It can gather no nourishment. It only carries

nourishment, being, in fact, a group of canals for the conveyance of

marketable commodities, with an electric telegraph attached to each,

transmitting messages from leaf to root, and root to leaf, up and down

the tree. But whatever view we take of the operative causes, the

external and visible fact is simply that every leaf does send down from

its stalk a slender thread of woody matter along the sides of the shoot

it grows upon; and that the increase of thickness in stem, proportioned

to the advance of the leaves, corresponds with an increase of thickness

in roots, proportioned to the advance of their outer fibres. How far

interchange of elements takes place between root and leaf, it is not our

work here to examine; the general and broad idea is this, that the whole

tree is fed partly by the earth, partly by the air;--strengthened and

sustained by the one, agitated and educated by the other;--all of it

which is best, in substance, life, and beauty, being drawn more from the

dew of heaven than the fatness of the earth. The results of this

nourishment of the bough by the leaf in external aspect, are the object

of our immediate inquiry.

§ 5. Hitherto we have considered the shoot as an ascending body,

throwing off buds at intervals. This it is indeed; but the part of it

which ascends is not seen externally. Look back to Plate 51. You will

observe that each shoot is furrowed, and that the ridges between the

furrows rise in slightly spiral lines, terminating in the armlets under

the buds which bore last year's leaves. These ridges, which rib the

shoot so distinctly, are not on the ascending part of it. They are the

contributions of each successive leaf thrown out as it ascended. Every

leaf sent down a slender cord, covering and clinging to the shoot

beneath, and increasing its thickness. Each, according to his size and

strength, wove his little strand of cable, as a spider his thread; and

cast it down the side of the springing tower by a marvellous

magic--irresistible! The fall of a granite pyramid from an Alp may

perhaps be stayed; the descending force of that silver thread shall not

be stayed. It will split the rocks themselves at its roots, if need be,

rather than fail in its work.

So many leaves, so many silver cords. Count--for by just the thickness

of one cord, beneath each leaf, let fall in fivefold order round and

round, the shoot increases in thickness to its root:--a spire built

downwards from the heaven.

[Illustration: FIG. 36.]

And now we see why the leaves dislike being above each other. Each seeks

a vacant place, where he may freely let fall the cord. The turning aside

of the cable to avoid the buds beneath, is one of the main causes of

spiral curvature, as the shoot increases. It required all the care I

could give to the drawing, and all Mr. Armytage's skill in engraving

Plate 51, to express, though drawing them nearly of their full size, the

principal courses of curvature in even this least graceful of trees.

§ 6. According to the structure thus ascertained, the body of the shoot

may at any point be considered as formed by a central rod, represented

by the shaded inner circle, _a_, Fig. 36, surrounded by as many rods of

descending external wood as there are leaves above the point where the

section is made. The first five leaves above send down the first dark

rods; and the next above send down those between, which, being from

younger leaves, are less liable to interstices; then the third group

sending down the side, it will be seen at a glance how a spiral action

is produced. It would lead us into too subtile detail, if I traced the

forces of this spiral superimposition. I must be content to let the

reader peruse this part of the subject for himself, if it amuses him,

and lead to larger questions.

§ 7. Broadly and practically, we may consider the whole cluster of woody

material in Fig. 36 as one circle of fibrous substance formed round a

small central rod. The real appearance in most trees is approximately as

in _b_, Fig. 36, the radiating structure becoming more distinct in

proportion to the largeness and compactness of the wood.[4]

[Illustration: FIG. 37.]

Now the next question is, how this descending external coating of wood

will behave itself when it comes to the forking of the shoots. To

simplify the examination of this, let us suppose the original or growing

shoot (whose section is the shaded inner circle in Fig. 36) to have been

in the form of a letter Y, and no thicker than a stout iron wire, as in

Fig. 37. Down the arms of this letter Y, we have two fibrous streams

running in the direction of the arrows. If the depth or thickness of

these streams be such as at _b_ and _c_, what will their thickness be

when they unite at _e_? Evidently, the quantity of wood surrounding the

vertical wire at _e_ must be twice as great as that surrounding the

wires _b_ and _c_.

§ 8. The reader will, perhaps, be good enough to take it on my word (if

he does not know enough of geometry to ascertain), that the large

circle, in Fig. 38, contains twice as much area as either of the two

smaller circles. Putting these circles in position, so as to guide us,

and supposing the trunk to be bounded by straight lines, we have for the

outline of the fork that in Fig. 38. How, then, do the two minor circles

change into one large one? The section of the stem at _a_ is a circle;

and at _b_, is a circle; and at _c_, a circle. But what is it at _e_?

Evidently, if the two circles merely united gradually, without change of

form through a series of figures, such as those at the top of Fig. 39,

the quantity of wood, instead of remaining the same, would diminish from

the contents of two circles to the contents of one. So for every loss

which the circles sustain at this junction, an equal quantity of wood

must be thrust out somehow to the side. Thus, to enable the circles to

run into each other, as far as shown at _b_, in Fig. 39, there must be a

loss between them of as much wood as the shaded space. Therefore, half

of that space must be added, or rather pushed out on each side, and the

section of the uniting branch becomes approximately as in _c_, Fig. 39;

the wood squeezed out encompassing the stem more as the circles close,

until the whole is reconciled into one larger single circle.

[Illustration: FIG. 38.]

[Illustration: FIG. 39.]

§ 9. I fear the reader would have no patience with me, if I asked him to

examine, in longitudinal section, the lines of the descending currents

of wood as they eddy into the increased single river. Of course, it is

just what would take place if two strong streams, filling each a

cylindrical pipe, ran together into one larger cylinder, with a central

rod passing up every tube. But, as this central rod increases, and, at

the same time, the supply of the stream from above, every added leaf

contributing its little current, the eddies of wood about the fork

become intensely curious and interesting; of which thus much the reader

may observe in a moment by gathering a branch of any tree (laburnum

shows it better, I think, than most), that the two meeting currents,

first wrinkling a little, then rise in a low wave in the hollow of the

fork, and flow over at the side, making their way to diffuse themselves

round the stem, as in Fig. 40. Seen laterally, the bough bulges out

below the fork, rather curiously and awkwardly, especially if more than

two boughs meet at the same place, growing in one plane, so as to show

the sudden increase on the profile. If the reader is interested in the

subject, he will find strangely complicated and wonderful arrangements

of stream when smaller boughs meet larger (one example is given in Plate

3, Vol. III., where the current of a smaller bough, entering upwards,

pushes its way into the stronger rivers of the stem). But I cannot, of

course, enter into such detail here.

[Illustration: FIG. 40.]

[Illustration: FIG. 41.]

§ 10. The little ringed accumulation, repelled from the wood of the

larger trunk at the base of small boughs, may be seen at a glance in any

tree, and needs no illustration; but I give one from Salvator, Fig. 41

(from his own etching, _Democritus omnium Derisor_), which is

interesting, because it shows the swelling at the bases of insertion,

which yet, Salvator's eye not being quick enough to detect the law of

descent in the fibres, he, with his usual love of ugliness, fastens on

this swollen character, and exaggerates it into an appearance of

disease. The same bloated aspect may be seen in the example already

given from another etching, Vol. III., Plate 4, Fig. 8.

[Illustration: FIG. 42.]

§ 11. I do not give any more examples from Claude. We have had enough

already in Plate 4, Vol. III., which the reader should examine

carefully. If he will then look forward to Fig. 61 here, he will see how

Turner inserts branches, and with what certain and strange instinct of

fidelity he marks the wrinkled enlargement and sinuous eddies of the

wood rivers where they meet.

And remember always that Turner's greatness and rightness in all these

points successively depend on no scientific knowledge. He was entirely

ignorant of all the laws we have been developing. He had merely

accustomed himself to see impartially, intensely, and fearlessly.

[Illustration: FIG. 43.]

§ 12. It may, perhaps, be interesting to compare, with the rude

fallacies of Claude and Salvator, a little piece of earliest art,

wrought by men who could see and feel. The scroll, Fig. 42, is a portion

of that which surrounds the arch in San Zeno of Verona, above the

pillar engraved in the _Stones of Venice_, Plate 17, Vol. I. It is,

therefore, twelfth, or earliest thirteenth century work. Yet the foliage

is already full of spring and life; and in the part of the stem, which I

have given of its real size in Fig. 43, the reader will perhaps be

surprised to see at the junctions the laws of vegetation, which escaped

the sight of all the degenerate landscape-painters of Italy, expressed

by one of her simple architectural workmen six hundred years ago.

We now know enough, I think, of the internal conditions which regulate

tree-structure to enable us to investigate finally, the great laws of

branch and stem aspect. But they are very beautiful; and we will give

them a separate chapter.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] See the note on Fig. 11, at page 17, which shows these two

directions in a shoot of lime.

[2] I find that the office and nature of cambium, the causes of the

action of the sap, and the real mode of the formation of buds, are

all still under the investigation of botanists. I do not lose time in

stating the doubts or probabilities which exist on these subjects.

For us, the mechanical fact of the increase of thickness by every

leaf's action is all that needs attention. The reader who wishes for

information as accurate as the present state of science admits, may

consult Lindley's _Introduction to Botany_, and an interesting little

book by Dr. Alexander Harvey on _Trees and their Nature_ (Nisbet &

Co., 1856), to which I owe much help.

[3] In the true sense a "mediator," ([Greek: mesitês]).

[4] The gradual development of this radiating structure, which is

organic and essential, composed of what are called by botanists

medullary rays, is still a great mystery and wonder to me.

CHAPTER VII.

THE STEM.

§ 1. We must be content, in this most complex subject, to advance very

slowly: and our easiest, if not our only way, will be to examine, first,

the conditions under which boughs would form, supposing them all to

divide in one plane, as your hand divides when you lay it flat on the

table, with the fingers as wide apart as you can. And then we will

deduce the laws of ramification which follow on the real structure of

branches, which truly divide, not in one plane, but as your fingers

separate if you hold a large round ball with them.

The reader has, I hope, a clear idea by this time of the main principle

of tree-growth; namely, that the increase is by addition, or

superimposition, not extension. A branch does not stretch itself out as

a leech stretches its body. But it receives additions at its extremity,

and proportional additions to its thickness. For although the actual

living shoot, or growing point, of any year, lengthens itself gradually

until it reaches its terminal bud, after that bud is formed, its length

is fixed. It is thenceforth one joint of the tree, like the joint of a

pillar, on which other joints of marble may be laid to elongate the

pillar, but which will not itself stretch. A tree is thus truly edified,

or built, like a house.

§ 2. I am not sure with what absolute stringency this law is observed,

or what slight lengthening of substance may be traceable by close

measurement among inferior branches. For practical purposes, we may

assume that the law is final, and that if we represent the state of a

plant, or extremity of branch, in any given year under the simplest

possible type, Fig. 44, _a_, of two shoots, with terminal buds,

springing from one stem, its growth next year may be expressed by the

type, Fig. 44, _b_, in which, the original stems not changing or

increasing, the terminal buds have built up each another story of

plant, or repetition of the original form; and, in order to support this

new edifice, have sent down roots all the way to the ground, so as to

enclose and thicken the inferior stem.

[Illustration: FIG. 44.]

But if this is so, how does the original stem, which never lengthens,

ever become the tall trunk of a tree? The arrangement just stated

provides very satisfactorily for making it stout, but not for making it

tall. If the ramification proceeds in this way, the tree must assuredly

become a round compact ball of short sticks, attached to the ground by a

very stout, almost invisible, stem, like a puff-ball.

For if we take the form above, on a small scale, merely to see what

comes of it, and carry its branching three steps farther, we get the

successive conditions in Fig. 45, of which the last comes already round

to the ground.

[Illustration: FIG. 45.]

"But those forms really look something like trees!" Yes, if they were on

a large scale. But each of the little shoots is only six or seven inches

long; the whole cluster would but be three or four feet over, and

touches the ground already at its extremity. It would enlarge if it went

on growing, but never rise from the ground.

§ 3. This is an interesting question: one, also, which, I fear, we must

solve, so far as yet it can be solved, with little help. Perhaps nothing

is more curious in the history of human mind than the way in which the

science of botany has become oppressed by nomenclature. Here is perhaps

the first question which an intelligent child would think of asking

about a tree: "Mamma, how does it make its trunk?" and you may open one

botanical work after another, and good ones too, and by sensible

men,--you shall not find this child's question fairly put, much less

fairly answered. You will be told gravely that a stem has received many

names, such as _culmus_, _stipes_, and _truncus_; that twigs were once

called _flagella_, but are now called _ramuli_; and that Mr. Link calls

a straight stem, with branches on its sides, a _caulis excurrens_; and a

stem, which at a certain distance above the earth breaks out into

irregular ramifications, a _caulis deliquescens_. All thanks and honor

be to Mr. Link! But at this moment, when we want to know _why_ one stem

breaks "at a certain distance," and the other not at all, we find

no great help in those splendid excurrencies and deliquescencies.

"At a certain distance?" Yes: but why not before? or why then? How

was it that, for many and many a year, the young shoots agreed to

construct a vertical tower, or, at least, the nucleus of one, and then,

one merry day, changed their minds, and built about their metropolis in

all directions, nobody knows where, far into the air in free delight?

How is it that yonder larch-stem grows straight and true, while all its

branches, constructed by the same process as the mother trunk, and under

the mother trunk's careful inspection and direction, nevertheless have

lost all their manners, and go forking and flashing about, more like

cracklings of spitefullest lightning than decent branches of trees that

dip green leaves in dew?

§ 4. We have probably, many of us, missed the point of such questions as

these, because we too readily associated the structure of trees with

that of flowers. The flowering part of a plant shoots out or up, in some

given direction, until, at a stated period, it opens or branches into

perfect form by a law just as fixed, and just as inexplicable, as that

which numbers the joints of an animal's skeleton, and puts the head on

its right joint. In many forms of flowers--foxglove, aloe, hemlock, or

blossom of maize--the structure of the flowering part so far assimilates

itself to that of a tree, that we not unnaturally think of a tree only

as a large flower, or large remnant of flower, run to seed. And we

suppose the time and place of its branching to be just as organically

determined as the height of the stalk of straw, or hemlock pipe, and the

fashion of its branching just as fixed as the shape of petals in a pansy

or cowslip.

§ 5. But that is not so; not so in anywise. So far as you can watch a

tree, it is produced throughout by repetitions of the same process,

which repetitions, however, are arbitrarily directed so as to produce

one effect at one time, and another at another time. A young sapling has

his branches as much as the tall tree. He does not shoot up in a long

thin rod, and begin to branch when he is ten or fifteen feet high, as

the hemlock or foxglove does when each has reached its ten or fifteen

inches. The young sapling conducts himself with all the dignity of a

tree from the first;--only he so manages his branches as to form a

support for his future life, in a strong straight trunk, that will hold

him well off the ground. Prudent little sapling!--but how does he manage

this? how keep the young branches from rambling about, till the proper

time, or on what plea dismiss them from his service if they will not

help his provident purpose? So again, there is no difference in mode of

construction between the trunk of a pine and its branch. But external

circumstances so far interfere with the results of this repeated

construction, that a stone pine rises for a hundred feet like a pillar,

and then suddenly bursts into a cloud. It is the knowledge of the mode

in which such change may take place which forms the true natural history

of trees:--or, more accurately, their moral history. An animal is born

with so many limbs, and a head of such a shape. That is, strictly

speaking, not its history, but one fact of its history: a fact of which

no other account can be given than that it was so appointed. But a tree

is born without a head. It has got to make its own head. It is born like

a little family from which a great nation is to spring; and at a certain

time, under peculiar external circumstances, this nation, every

individual of which remains the same in nature and temper, yet gives

itself a new political constitution, and sends out branch colonies,

which enforce forms of law and life entirely different from those of the

parent state. That is the history of the state. It is also the history

of a tree.

§ 6. Of these hidden histories, I know and can tell you as little as I

did of the making of rocks. It will be enough for me if I can put the

difficulty fairly before you, show you clearly such facts as are

necessary to the understanding of great Art, and so leave you to pursue,

at your pleasure, the graceful mystery of this imperfect leafage life.

I took in the outset the type of a _triple_ but as the most general

that could be given of all trees, because it represents a prevalently

upright main tendency, with a capacity of branching on both sides. I

would have shown the power of branching on _all_ sides if I could; but

we must be content at first with the simplest condition. From what we

have seen since of bud structure, we may now make our type more complete

by giving each bud a root proportioned to its size. And our elementary

type of tree plant will be as in Fig. 46.

[Illustration: FIG. 46.]

§ 7. Now these three buds, though differently placed, have all one mind.

No bud has an oblique mind. Every one would like, if he could, to grow

upright, and it is because the midmost one has entirely his own way in

this matter, that he is largest. He is an elder brother;--his birthright

is to grow straight towards the sky. A younger child may perhaps

supplant him, if he does not care for his privilege. In the meantime all

are of one family, and love each other,--so that the two lateral buds do

not stoop aside because they like it, but to let their more favored

brother grow in peace. All the three buds and roots have at heart the

same desire;--which is, the one to grow as straight as he can towards

bright heaven, the other as deep as he can into dark earth. Up to light,

and down to shade;--into air and into rock:--that is their mind and

purpose for ever. So far as they can, in kindness to each other, and by

sufferance of external circumstances, work out that destiny, they will.

But their beauty will not result from their working it out,--only from

their maintained purpose and resolve to do so, if it may be. They will

fail--certainly two, perhaps all three of them: fail

egregiously;--ridiculously;--it may be agonizingly. Instead of growing

up, they may be wholly sacrificed to happier buds above, and have to

grow _down_, sideways, roundabout ways, all sorts of ways. Instead of

getting down quietly into the convent of the earth, they may have to

cling and crawl about hardest and hottest angles of it, full in sight of

man and beast, and roughly trodden under foot by them;--stumbling-blocks

to many.

Yet out of such sacrifice, gracefully made--such misfortune, gloriously

sustained--all their true beauty is to arise. Yes, and from more than

sacrifice--more than misfortune: from _death_. Yes, and more than

death:--from the worst kind of death: not natural, coming to each in

its due time; but premature, oppressed, unnatural, misguided--or so it

would seem--to the poor dying sprays. Yet, without such death, no strong

trunk were ever possible; no grace of glorious limb or glittering leaf;

no companionship with the rest of nature or with man.

[Illustration: FIG. 47.]

§ 8. Let us see how this must be. We return to our poor little threefold

type, Fig. 46, above. Next year he will become as in Fig. 47. The two

lateral buds keeping as much as may be out of their brother's way, and

yet growing upwards with a will, strike diagonal lines, and in moderate

comfort accomplish their year's life and terminal buds. But what is to

be done next? Forming the triple terminal head on this diagonal line, we

find that one of our next year's buds, _c_, will have to grow down

again, which is very hard; and another, _b_, will run right against the

lateral branch of the upper bud, A, which must not be allowed under any

circumstances.

What are we to do?

[Illustration: FIG. 48.]

§ 9. The best we can. Give up our straightness, and some of our length,

and consent to grow short, and crooked. But _b_ shall be ordered to

stoop forward and keep his head out of the great bough's way, as in Fig.

48, and grow as he best may, with the consumptive pain in his chest. To

give him a little more room, the elder brother, _a_, shall stoop a

little forward also, recovering himself when he has got out of _b_'s

way; and bud _c_ shall be encouraged to bend himself bravely round and

up, after his first start in that disagreeable downward direction. Poor

_b_, withdrawn from air and light between _a_ and A, and having to live

stooping besides, cannot make much of himself, and is stunted and

feeble. _c_, having free play for his energies, bends up with a will,

and becomes handsomer, to our minds, than if he had been straight; and

_a_ is none the worse for his concession to unhappy _b_ in early life.

[Illustration: FIG. 49.]

So far well for this year. But how for next? _b_ is already too near the

spray above him, even for his own strength and comfort; much less, with

his weak constitution, will he be able to throw up any strong new

shoots. And if he did, they would only run into those of the bough

above. (If the reader will proceed in the construction of the whole

figure he will see that this is so.) Under these discouragements and

deficiencies, _b_ is probably frostbitten, and drops off. The bough

proceeds, mutilated, and itself somewhat discouraged. But it repeats its

sincere and good-natured compliances, and at the close of the year, new

wood from all the leaves having concealed the stump, and effaced the

memory of poor lost _b_, and perhaps a consolatory bud lower down having

thrown out a tiny spray to make the most of the vacant space near the

main stem, we shall find the bough in some such shape as Fig. 49.

§ 10. Wherein we already see the germ of our irregularly bending branch,

which might ultimately be much the prettier for the loss of _b_. Alas!

the Fates have forbidden even this. While the low bough is making all

these exertions, the boughs of A, above him, higher in air, have made

the same under happier auspices. Every year their thicker leaves more

and more forbid the light; and, after rain, shed their own drops

unwittingly on the unfortunate lower bough, and prevent the air or sun

from drying his bark or checking the chill in his medullary rays. Slowly

a hopeless languor gains upon him. He buds here or there, faintly, in

the spring; but the flow of strong wood from above oppresses him even

about his root, where it joins the trunk. The very sap does not turn

aside to him, but rushes up to the stronger, laughing leaves far above.

Life is no more worth having; and abandoning all effort, the poor bough

drops, and finds consummation of destiny in helping an old woman's

fire.

When he is gone, the one next above is left with greater freedom, and

will shoot now from points of its sprays which were before likely to

perish. Hence another condition of irregularity in form. But that bough

also will fall in its turn, though after longer persistence. Gradually

thus the central trunk is built, and the branches by whose help it was

formed cast off, leaving here and there scars, which are all effaced by

years, or lost sight of among the roughnesses and furrows of the aged

surface. The work is continually advancing, and thus the head of foliage

on any tree is not an expansion at a given height, like a flower-bell,

but the collective group of boughs, or workmen, who have got up so far,

and will get up higher next year, still losing one or two of their

number underneath.

§ 11. So far well. But this only accounts for the formation of a

vertical trunk. How is it that at a certain height this vertical trunk

ceases to be built; and irregular branches spread in all directions?

First: In a great number of trees, the vertical trunk never ceases to be

built. It is confused, at the top of the tree, among other radiating

branches, being at first, of course, just as slender as they, and only

prevailing over them in time. It shows at the top the same degree of

irregularity and undulation as a sapling; and is transformed gradually

into straightness lower down (see Fig. 50). The reader has only to take

an hour's ramble, to see for himself how many trees are thus

constructed, if circumstances are favorable to their growth. Again, the

mystery of blossoming has great influence in increasing the tendency to

dispersion among the upper boughs: but this part of vegetative structure

I cannot enter into; it is too subtle, and has, besides, no absolute

bearing on our subject; the principal conditions which produce the

varied play of branches being purely mechanical. The point at which they

show a determined tendency to spread is generally to be conceived as a

place of _rest_ for the tree, where it has reached the height from the

ground at which ground-mist, imperfect circulation of air, &c., have

ceased to operate injuriously on it, and where it has free room, and

air, and light for its growth.

[Illustration: FIG. 50.]

§ 12. I find there is quite an infinite interest in watching the

different ways in which trees part their sprays at this resting-place,

and the sometimes abrupt, sometimes gentle and undiscoverable, severing

of the upright stem into the wandering and wilful branches; but a

volume, instead of a chapter or two, and quite a little gallery of

plates, would be needed to illustrate the various grace of this

division, associated as it is with an exquisitely subtle effacing of

undulation in the thicker stems, by the flowing down of the wood from

above; the curves which are too violent in the branches being filled up,

so that what was at _a_, Fig. 50, becomes as at _b_, and when the main

stem is old, passes at last into straightness by almost imperceptible

curves, a continually gradated emphasis of curvature being carried to

the branch extremities.

[Illustration: FIG. 51.]

§ 13. Hitherto we have confined ourselves entirely to examination of

stems in one plane. We must glance--though only to ascertain how

impossible it is to do more than glance--at the conditions of form which

result from the throwing out of branches, not in one plane, but on all

sides. "As your fingers divide when they hold a ball," I said: or,

better, a large cup, without a handle. Consider how such ramification

will appear in one of the bud groups, that of our old friend the oak. We

saw it opened usually into five shoots. Imagine, then (Fig. 51), a

five-sided cup or funnel with a stout rod running through the centre of

it. In the figure it is seen from above, so as partly to show the

inside, and a little obliquely, that the central rod may not hide any of

the angles. Then let us suppose that, where the angles of this cup were,

we have, instead, five rods, as in Fig. 52, A, like the ribs of a

pentagonal umbrella turned inside out by the wind. I dot the pentagon

which connects their extremities, to keep their positions clear. Then

these five rods, with the central one, will represent the five shoots,

and the leader, from a vigorous young oak-spray. Put the leaves on each;

the five-foiled star at its extremity, and the others, now not quite

formally, but still on the whole as in Fig. 3 above, and we have the

result, Fig. 52, B--rather a pretty one.

[Illustration: FIG. 52.]

§ 14. By considering the various aspects which the five rods would take

in Fig. 52, as the entire group was seen from below or above, and at

different angles and distances, the reader may find out for himself what

changes of aspect are possible in even so regular a structure as this.

But the branchings soon take more complex symmetry. We know that next

year each of these five subordinate rods is to enter into life on its

own account, and to repeat the branching of the first. Thus, we shall

have five pentagonal cups surrounding a large central pentagonal cup.

This figure, if the reader likes a pretty perspective problem, he may

construct for his own pleasure:--which having done, or conceived, he is

then to apply the great principles of subjection and resilience, not to

three branches only, as in Fig. 49, but to the five of each cup;--by

which the cups get flattened out and bent up, as you may have seen

vessels of Venetian glass, so that every cup actually takes something

the shape of a thick aloe or artichoke leaf; and they surround the

central one, not as a bunch of grapes surrounds a grape at the end of

it, but as the petals grow round the centre of a rose. So that any one

of these lateral branches--though, seen from above, it would present a

symmetrical figure, as if it were not flattened (A, Fig. 53)--seen

sideways, or in profile, will show itself to be at least as much

flattened as at B.

[Illustration: FIG. 53.]

§ 15. You may thus regard the whole tree as composed of a series of such

thick, flat, branch-leaves; only incomparably more varied and enriched

in framework as they spread; and arranged more or less in spirals round

the trunk. Gather a cone of a Scotch fir; begin at the bottom of it, and

pull off the seeds, so as to show one of the spiral rows of them

continuously, from the bottom to the top, leaving enough seeds above

them to support the row. Then the gradual lengthening of the seeds from

the root, their spiral arrangement, and their limitation within a

curved, convex form, furnish the best _severe_ type you can have of the

branch system of all stemmed trees; and each seed of the cone

represents, not badly, the sort of flattened solid leaf-shape which all

complete branches have. Also, if you will try to draw the spiral of the

fir-cone, you will understand something about tree-perspective, which

may be generally useful. Finally, if you note the way in which the seeds

of the cone slip each farther and farther over each other, so as to

change sides in the middle of the cone, and obtain a reversed action of

spiral lines in the upper half, you may imagine what a piece of work it

would be for both of us, if we were to try to follow the complexities of

branch order in trees of irregular growth, such as the rhododendron. I

tried to do it, at least, for the pine, in section, but saw I was

getting into a perfect maelström of spirals, from which no efforts would

have freed me, in any imaginable time, and the only safe way was to keep

wholly out of the stream.

[Illustration: FIG. 54.]

§ 16. The alternate system, leading especially to the formation of

forked trees, is more manageable; and if the reader is master of

perspective, he may proceed some distance in the examination of that for

himself. But I do not care to frighten the general reader by many

diagrams: the book is always sure to open at them when he takes it up. I

will venture on one which has perhaps something a little amusing about

it, and is really of importance.

[Illustration: FIG. 55.]

[Illustration: J. Ruskin J. Emslie

56. Sketch by a Clerk of the Works.]

§ 17. Let X, Fig. 54, represent a shoot of any opposite-leaved tree. The

mode in which it will grow into a tree depends, mainly, on its

disposition to lose the leader or a lateral shoot. If it keeps the

leader, but drops the lateral, it takes the form A, and next year by a

repetition of the process, B. But if it keeps the laterals, and drops

the leader, it becomes first, C and next year, D. The form A is almost

universal in spiral or alternate trees; and it is especially to be noted

as bringing about this result, that in any given forking, one bough

always goes on in its own direct course, and the other leaves it softly;

they do not separate as if one was repelled from the other. Thus in Fig.

55, a perfect and nearly symmetrical piece of ramification, by Turner

(lowest bough but one in the tree on the left in the "Château of La

belle Gabrielle"), the leading bough, going on in its own curve, throws

off, first, a bough to the right, then one to the left, then two small

ones to the right, and proceeds itself, hidden by leaves, to form the

farthest upper point of the branch.

The lower secondary bough--the first thrown off--proceeds in its own

curve, branching first to the left, then to the right.

The upper bough proceeds in the same way, throwing off first to left,

then to right. And this is the commonest and most graceful structure.

But if the tree loses the leader, as at C, Fig. 54 (and many opposite

trees have a trick of doing so), a very curious result is arrived at,

which I will give in a geometrical form.

§ 18. The number of branches which die, so as to leave the main stem

bare, is always greatest low down, or near the interior of the tree. It

follows that the lengths of stem which do not fork diminish gradually to

the extremities, in a fixed proportion. This is a general law. Assume,

for example's sake, the stem to separate always into two branches, at an

equal angle, and that each branch is three quarters of the length of the

preceding one. Diminish their thickness in proportion, and carry out the

figure any extent you like. In Plate 56, opposite, Fig. 1, you have it

at its ninth branch; in which I wish you to notice, first, the delicate

curve formed by every complete line of the branches (compare Vol. IV.

Fig. 91); and, secondly, the very curious result of the top of the tree

being a broad flat line, which passes at an angle into lateral shorter

lines, and so down to the extremities. It is this property which renders

the contours of tops of trees so intensely difficult to draw rightly,

without making their curves too smooth and insipid.

Observe, also, that the great weight of the foliage being thrown on the

outside of each main fork, the tendency of forked trees is very often to

droop and diminish the bough on one side, and erect the other into a

principal mass.[1]

§ 19. But the form in a perfect tree is dependent on the revolution of

this sectional profile, so as to produce a mushroom-shaped or

cauliflower-shaped mass, of which I leave the reader to enjoy the

perspective drawing by himself, adding, after he has completed it, the

effect of the law of resilience to the extremities. Only, he must note

this: that in real trees, as the branches rise from the ground, the open

spaces underneath are partly filled by subsequent branchings, so that a

real tree has not so much the shape of a mushroom, as of an apple, or,

if elongated, a pear.

§ 20. And now you may just begin to understand a little of Turner's

meaning in those odd pear-shaped trees of his, in the "Mercury and

Argus," and other such compositions: which, however, before we can do

completely, we must gather our evidence together, and see what general

results will come of it respecting the hearts and fancies of trees, no

less than their forms.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] This is Harding's favorite form of tree. You will find it much

insisted on in his works on foliage. I intended to have given a

figure to show the results of the pressure of the weight of all the

leafage on a great lateral bough, in modifying its curves, the

strength of timber being greatest where the leverage of the mass

tells most. But I find nobody ever reads things which it takes any

trouble to understand, so that it is of no use to write them.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE LEAF MONUMENTS.

§ 1. And now, having ascertained in its main points the system on which

the leaf-workers build, let us see, finally, what results in aspect, and

appeal to human mind, their building must present. In some sort it

resembles that of the coral animal, differing, however, in two points.

First, the animal which forms branched coral, builds, I believe, in calm

water, and has few accidents of current, light, or heat to contend with.

He builds in monotonous ramification, untormented, therefore

unbeautiful. Secondly, each coral animal builds for himself, adding his

cell to what has been before constructed, as a bee adds another cell to

the comb. He obtains no essential connection with the root and

foundation of the whole structure. That foundation is thickened

clumsily, by a fused and encumbering aggregation, as a stalactite

increases;--not by threads proceeding from the extremities to the root.

§ 2. The leaf, as we have seen, builds in both respects under opposite

conditions. It leads a life of endurance, effort, and various success,

issuing in various beauty; and it connects itself with the whole

previous edifice by one sustaining thread, continuing its appointed

piece of work all the way from top to root. Whence result three great

conditions in branch aspect, for which I cannot find good names, but

must use the imperfect ones of "Spring," "Caprice," "Fellowship."

§ 3. I. SPRING: or the appearance of elastic and progressive power, as

opposed to that look of a bent piece of cord.--This follows partly on

the poise of the bough, partly on its action in seeking or shunning.

Every branch-line expresses both these. It takes a curve accurately

showing the relations between the strength of the sprays in that

position (growing downward, upward, or laterally), and the weight of

leaves they carry; and again, it takes a curve expressive of the will

or aim of those sprays, during all their life, and handed down from sire

to son, in steady inheritance of resolution to reach forward in a given

direction, or bend away from some given evil influence.

And all these proportionate strengths and measured efforts of the bough

produce its loveliness, and ought to be felt, in looking at it, not by

any mathematical evidence, but by the same fine instinct which enables

us to perceive, when a girl dances rightly, that she moves easily, and

with delight to herself; that her limbs are strong enough, and her body

tender enough, to move precisely as she wills them to move. You cannot

say of any bend of arm or foot what precise relations of their curves to

the whole figure manifest, in their changeful melodies, that ease of

motion; yet you feel that they do so, and you feel it by a true

instinct. And if you reason on the matter farther, you may know, though

you cannot see, that an absolute mathematical necessity proportions

every bend of the body to the rate and direction of its motion; and that

the momentary fancy and fire of the will measure themselves, even in

their gaily-fancied freedom, by stern laws of nervous life, and material

attraction, which regulate eternally every pulse of the strength of man,

and every sweep of the stars of heaven.

§ 4. Observe, also, the balance of the bough of a tree is quite as

subtle as that of a figure in motion. It is a balance between the

elasticity of the bough and the weight of leaves, affected in curvature,

literally, by the growth of _every_ leaf; and besides this, when it

moves, it is partly supported by the resistance of the air, greater or

less, according to the shape of leaf;--so that branches float on the

wind more than they yield to it; and in their tossing do not so much

bend under a force, as rise on a wave, which penetrates in liquid

threads through all their sprays.

[Illustration]

[Illustration: 57. Leafage by Durer and Veronese.]

[Illustration: FIG. 56. _To face page 65._]

§ 5. I am not sure how far, by any illustration, I can exemplify these

subtle conditions of form. All my plans have been shortened, and I have

learned to content myself with yet more contracted issues of them after

the shortening, because I know that nearly all in such matters must be

said or shown, unavailably. No saying will teach the truth. Nothing but

doing. If the reader will draw boughs of trees long and faithfully,

giving previous pains to gain the power (how rare!) of drawing

_anything_ faithfully, he will come to see what Turner's work is,

or any other right work, but not by reading, nor thinking, nor idly

looking. However, in some degree, even our ordinary instinctive

perception of grace and balance may serve us, if we choose to pay any

accurate attention to the matter.

§ 6. Look back to Fig. 55. That bough of Turner's is exactly and

exquisitely poised, leaves and all, for its present horizontal position.

Turn the book so as to put the spray upright, with the leaves at the

top. You ought to see they would then be wrong;--that they must, in that

position, have adjusted themselves more directly above the main stem,

and more firmly, the curves of the lighter sprays being a deflection

caused by their weight in the horizontal position. Again, Fig. 56

represents, enlarged to four times the size of the original, the two

Scotch firs in Turner's etching of Inverary.[1] These are both in

perfect poise, representing a double action: the warping of the trees

away from the sea-wind, and the continual growing out of the boughs on

the right-hand side, to recover the balance.

Turn the page so as to be horizontal, and you ought to feel that,

considered now as branches, both would be out of balance. If you turn

the heads of the trees to your right, they are wrong, because gravity

would have bent them more downwards; if to your left, wrong, because the

law of resilience would have raised them more at the extremities.

§ 7. Now take two branches of Salvator's, Figs. 57 and 58.[2] You ought

to feel that these have neither poise nor spring: their leaves are

incoherent, ragged, hanging together in decay.

[Illustration: FIG. 57.]

[Illustration: FIG. 58.]

Immediately after these, turn to Plate 57, opposite. The branch at the

top is facsimiled from that in the hand of Adam, in Durer's Adam and

Eve.[3] It is full of the most exquisite vitality and spring in every

line. Look at it for five minutes carefully. Then turn back to

Salvator's, Fig. 57. Are you as well satisfied with it? You ought to

feel that it is not strong enough at the origin to sustain the leaves;

and that if it were, those leaves themselves are in broken or forced

relations with each other. Such relations might, indeed, exist in a

partially withered tree, and one of these branches is intended to be

partially withered, but the other is not; and if it were, Salvator's

choice of the withered tree is precisely the sign of his preferring

ugliness to beauty, decrepitude and disorganization to life and youth.

The leaves on the spray, by Durer, hold themselves as the girl holds

herself in dancing; those on Salvator's as an old man, partially

palsied, totters along with broken motion, and loose deflection of limb.

§ 8. Next, let us take a spray by Paul Veronese[4]--the lower figure in

Plate 57. It is just as if we had gathered one out of the garden. Though

every line and leaf in the quadruple group is necessary to join with

other parts of the composition of the noble picture, every line and leaf

is also as free and true as if it were growing. None are confused, yet

none are loose; all are individual, yet none separate, in tender poise

of pliant strength and fair order of accomplished grace, each, by due

force of the indulgent bough, set and sustained.

§ 9. Observe, however, that in all these instances from earlier masters,

the expression of the universal botanical law of poise is independent of

accuracy in rendering of species. As before noticed, the neglect of

specific distinction long restrained the advance of landscape, and even

hindered Turner himself in many respects. The sprays of Veronese are a

conventional type of laurel; Albert Durer's an imaginary branch of

paradisaical vegetation; Salvator's, a rude reminiscence of sweet

chestnut; Turner's only is a faithful rendering of the Scotch fir.

[Illustration: 58. Branch Curvature.]

[Illustration: FIG. 59.]

[Illustration: FIG. 60.]

[Illustration: FIG. 61 _To face page 69._]

§ 10. To show how the principle of balance is carried out by Nature

herself, here is a little terminal upright spray of willow, the most

graceful of English trees (Fig. 59). I have drawn it carefully; and if

the reader will study its curves, or, better, trace and pencil them with

a perfectly fine point, he will feel, I think, without difficulty, their

finished relation to the leaves they sustain. Then if we turn suddenly

to a piece of Dutch branch-drawing (Fig. 60), facsimiled from No. 160,

Dulwich Gallery (Berghem), he will understand, I believe, also the

qualities of that, without comment of mine. It is of course not so dark

in the original, being drawn with the chance dashes of a brush loaded

with brown, but the contours are absolutely as in the woodcut. This

Dutch design is a very characteristic example of two faults in

tree-drawing; namely, the loss not only of grace and spring, but of

woodiness. A branch is not elastic as steel is, neither as a carter's

whip is. It is a combination, wholly peculiar, of elasticity with

half-dead and sapless stubbornness, and of continuous curve with pauses

of knottiness, every bough having its blunted, affronted, fatigued,

or repentant moments of existence, and mingling crabbed rugosities

and fretful changes of mind with the main tendencies of its growth. The

piece of pollard willow opposite (Fig. 61), facsimiled from Turner's

etching of "Young Anglers," in the Liber Studiorum, has all these

characters in perfectness, and may serve for sufficient study of them.

It is impossible to explain in what the expression of the woody strength

consists, unless it be felt. One very obvious condition is the excessive

fineness of curvature, approximating continually to a straight line. In

order to get a piece of branch curvature given as accurately as I could

by an unprejudiced person, I set one of my pupils at the Working Men's

College (a joiner by trade) to draw, last spring, a lilac branch of its

real size, as it grew, before it budded. It was about six feet long, and

before he could get it quite right, the buds came out and interrupted

him; but the fragment he got drawn is engraved in flat profile, in Plate

58. It has suffered much by reduction, one or two of its finest curves

having become lost in the mere thickness of the lines. Nevertheless, if

the reader will compare it carefully with the Dutch work, it will teach

him something about trees.

§ 11. II. CAPRICE.--The next character we had to note of the

leaf-builders was their capriciousness, noted, partly, in Vol. III.

chap. ix. § 14. It is a character connected with the ruggedness and

ill-temperedness just spoken of, and an essential source of branch

beauty: being in reality the written story of all the branch's life,--of

the theories it formed, the accidents it suffered, the fits of

enthusiasm to which it yielded in certain delicious warm springs; the

disgusts at weeks of east wind, the mortifications of itself for its

friends' sakes; or the sudden and successful inventions of new ways of

getting out to the sun. The reader will understand this character in a

moment, by merely comparing Fig. 62, which is a branch of Salvator's,[5]

with Fig. 63, which I have traced from the engraving, in the Yorkshire

series, of Turner's "Aske Hall." You cannot but feel at once, not only

the wrongness of Salvator's, but its dulness. It is not now a question

either of poise, or grace, or gravity; only of wit. That bough has got

no sense; it has not been struck by a single new idea from the beginning

of it to the end; dares not even cross itself with one of its own

sprays. You will be amazed, in taking up any of these old engravings, to

see how seldom the boughs _do_ cross each other. Whereas, in nature, not

only is the intersection of extremities a mathematical necessity (see

Plate 56), but out of this intersection and crossing of curve by curve,

and the opposition of line it involves, the best part of their

composition arises. Look at the way the boughs are interwoven in that

piece of lilac stem (Plate 58).

[Illustration: FIG. 62.]

[Illustration: FIG. 63.]

[Illustration: 59. The Dryad's Waywardness.]

§ 12. Again: As it seldom struck the old painters that boughs must cross

each other, so it never seems to have occurred to them that they must be

sometimes foreshortened. I chose this bit from "Aske Hall," that you

might see at once, both how Turner foreshortens the main stem, and how,

in doing so, he shows the turning aside, and outwards, of the one next

to it, to the left, to get more air.[6] Indeed, this foreshortening lies

at the core of the business; for unless it be well understood, no

branch-form can ever be rightly drawn. I placed the oak spray in Plate

51 so as to be seen as nearly straight on its flank as possible. It is

the most uninteresting position in which a bough can be drawn; but it

shows the first simple action of the law of resilience. I will now turn

the bough with its extremity towards us, and foreshorten it (Plate 59),

which being done, you perceive another tendency in the whole branch, not

seen at all in the first Plate, to throw its sprays to its own right (or

to your left), which it does to avoid the branch next it, while the

_forward_ action is in a sweeping curve round to your right, or to the

branch's left: a curve which it takes to recover position after its

first concession. The lines of the nearer and smaller shoots are very

nearly--thus foreshortened--those of a boat's bow. Here is a piece of

Dutch foreshortening for you to compare with it, Fig. 64.[7]

[Illustration: FIG. 64.]

§ 13. In this final perfection of bough-drawing, Turner stands _wholly

alone_. Even Titian does not foreshorten his boughs rightly. Of course

he could, if he had cared to do so; for if you can foreshorten a limb or

a hand, much more a tree branch. But either he had never looked at a

tree carefully enough to feel that it was necessary, or, which is more

likely, he disliked to introduce in a background elements of vigorous

projection. Be the reason what it may, if you take Lefèvre's plates of

the Peter Martyr and St. Jerome--the only ones I know which give any

idea of Titian's tree-drawing, you will observe at once that the boughs

lie in flakes, artificially set to the right and left, and are not

intricate or varied, even where the foliage indicates some

foreshortening;--completing thus the evidence for my statement long ago

given, that no man but Turner had ever drawn the stem of a tree.

[Illustration: FIG. 65.]

[Illustration: FIG. 66.]

§ 14. It may be well also to note, for the advantage of the general

student of design, that, in foliage and bough drawing, all the final

grace and general utility of the study depend on its being well

foreshortened; and that, till the power of doing so quite accurately is

obtained, no landscape-drawing is of the least value; nor can the

character of any tree be known at all until not only its branches, but

its minutest extremities, have been drawn in the severest

foreshortening, with little accompanying plans of the arrangements of

the leaves or buds, or thorns, on the stem. Thus Fig. 65 is the

extremity of a single shoot of spruce foreshortened, showing the

resilience of its swords from beneath, and Fig. 66 is a little

ground-plan, showing the position of the three lowest triple groups of

thorn on a shoot of gooseberry.[8] The fir shoot is carelessly drawn;

but it is not worth while to do it better, unless I engraved it on

steel, so as to show the fine relations of shade.

§ 15. III. FELLOWSHIP.--The compactness of mass presented by this little

sheaf of pine-swords may lead us to the consideration of the last

character I have to note of boughs; namely, the mode of their

association in masses. It follows, of course, from all the laws of

growth we have ascertained, that the terminal outline of any tree or

branch must be a simple one, containing within it, at a given height or

level, the series of leaves of the year; only we have not yet noticed

the kind of form which results, in each branch, from the part it has to

take in forming the mass of the tree. The systems of branching are

indeed infinite, and could not be exemplified by any number of types;

but here are two common types, in section, which will enough explain

what I mean.

[Illustration: FIG. 67.]

§ 16. If a tree branches with a concave tendency, it is apt to carry its

boughs to the outer curve of limitation, as at A, Fig. 67, and if with a

convex tendency, as at B. In either case the vertical section, or

profile, of a bough will give a triangular mass, terminated by curves,

and elongated at one extremity. These triangular masses you may see at a

glance, prevailing in the branch system of any tree in winter. They may,

of course, be mathematically reduced to the four types _a_, _b_, _c_,

and _d_, Fig. 67, but are capable of endless variety of expression in

action, and in the adjustment of their weights to the bearing stem.

§ 17. To conclude, then, we find that the beauty of these buildings of

the leaves consists, from the first step of it to the last, in its

showing their perfect fellowship; and a single aim uniting them under

circumstances of various distress, trial, and pleasure. Without the

fellowship, no beauty; without the steady purpose, no beauty; without

trouble, and death, no beauty; without individual pleasure, freedom, and

caprice, so far as may be consistent with the universal good, no beauty.

[Illustration: FIG. 68.]

[Illustration: FIG. 69.]

§ 18. Tree-loveliness might be thus lost or killed in many ways.

Discordance would kill it--of one leaf with another; disobedience would

kill it--of any leaf to the ruling law; indulgence would kill it, and

the doing away with pain; or slavish symmetry would kill it, and the

doing away with delight. And this is so, down to the smallest atom and

beginning of life: so soon as there is life at all, there are these four

conditions of it;--harmony, obedience, distress, and delightsome

inequality. Here is the magnified section of an oak-bud, not the size of

a wheat grain (Fig. 68). Already its nascent leaves are seen arranged

under the perfect law of resilience, preparing for stoutest work on the

right side. Here is a dogwood bud just opening into life (Fig. 69). Its

ruling law is to be four square, but see how the uppermost leaf takes

the lead, and the lower bends up, already a little distressed by the

effort. Here is a birch-bud, farther advanced, Fig. 70. Who shall say

how many humors the little thing has in its mind already; or how many

adventures it has passed through? And so to the end. Help, submission,

sorrow, dissimilarity, are the sources of all good;--war, disobedience,

luxury, equality, the sources of all evil.

[Illustration: FIG. 70.]

§ 19. There is yet another and a deeply laid lesson to be received from

the leaf-builders, which I hope the reader has already perceived. Every

leaf, we have seen, connects its work with the entire and accumulated

result of the work of its predecessors. Their previous construction

served it during its life, raised it towards the light, gave it more

free sway and motion in the wind, and removed it from the noxiousness of

earth exhalation. Dying, it leaves its own small but well-labored

thread, adding, though imperceptibly, yet essentially, to the strength,

from root to crest, of the trunk on which it had lived, and fitting that

trunk for better service to succeeding races of leaves.

We men, sometimes, in what we presume to be humility, compare ourselves

with leaves; but we have as yet no right to do so. The leaves may well

scorn the comparison. We who live for ourselves, and neither know how

to use nor keep the work of past time, may humbly learn,--as from the

ant, foresight,--from the leaf, reverence. The power of every great

people, as of every living tree, depends on its not effacing, but

confirming and concluding, the labors of its ancestors. Looking back to

the history of nations, we may date the beginning of their decline from

the moment when they ceased to be reverent in heart, and accumulative in

hand and brain; from the moment when the redundant fruit of age hid in

them the hollowness of heart, whence the simplicities of custom and

sinews of tradition had withered away. Had men but guarded the righteous

laws, and protected the precious works of their fathers, with half the

industry they have given to change and to ravage, they would not now

have been seeking vainly, in millennial visions and mechanic servitudes,

the accomplishment of the promise made to them so long ago: "As the days

of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the

work of their hands; they shall not labor in vain, nor bring forth for

trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the Lord, and their

offspring with them."

§ 20. This lesson we have to take from the leaf's life. One more we may

receive from its death. If ever in autumn a pensiveness falls upon us as

the leaves drift by in their fading, may we not wisely look up in hope

to their mighty monuments? Behold how fair, how far prolonged, in arch

and aisle, the avenues of the valleys; the fringes of the hills! So

stately,--so eternal; the joy of man, the comfort of all living

creatures, the glory of the earth,--they are but the monuments of those

poor leaves that flit faintly past us to die. Let them not pass, without

our understanding their last counsel and example: that we also, careless

of monument by the grave, may build it in the world--monument by which

men may be taught to remember, not where we died, but where we lived.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] They are enlarged, partly in order to show the care and

minuteness of Turner's drawing on the smallest scale, partly to save

the reader the trouble of using a magnifying glass, partly because

this woodcut will print safely; while if I had facsimiled the fine

Turner etching, the block might have been spoiled after a hundred

impressions.

[2] Magnified to twice the size of the original, but otherwise

facsimiled from his own etching of Oedipus, and the School of Plato.

[3] The parrot perched on it is removed, which may be done without

altering the curve, as the bird is set where its weight would not

have bent the wood.

[4] The largest laurel spray in the background of the "Susanna,"

Louvre--reduced to about a fifth of the original. The drawing was

made for me by M. Hippolyte Dubois, and I am glad it is not one of my

own, lest I should be charged with exaggerating Veronese's accuracy.

This group of leaves is, in the original, of the life-size; the

circle which interferes with the spray on the right being the outline

of the head and of one of the elders; and, as painted for distant

effect, there is no care in completing the stems:--they are struck

with a few broken touches of the brush, which cannot be imitated in

the engraving, and much of their spirit is lost in consequence.

[5] The longest in "Apollo and the Sibyl," engraved by Boydell.

(Reduced one-half.)

[6] The foreshortening of the bough to the right is a piece of great

audacity; it comes towards us two or three feet sharply, after

forking, so as to look half as thick again as at the fork;--then

bends back again, and outwards.

[7] Hobbima. Dulwich Gallery, No. 131. Turn the book with its inner

edge up.

[8] Their change from groups of three to groups of two, and then to

single thorns at the end of the spray, will be found very beautiful

in a real shoot. The figure on the left in Plate 52 is a branch of

blackthorn with its spines (which are a peculiar condition of branch,

and can bud like branches, while thorns have no root nor power of

development). Such a branch gives good practice without too much

difficulty.

CHAPTER IX.

THE LEAF SHADOWS.

[Illustration: FIG. 71.]

§ 1. It may be judged, by the time which it has taken to arrive at any

clear idea of the structure of shield-builders, what a task would open

to us if we endeavored to trace the more wonderful forms of the wild

builders with the sword. Not that they are more complex; but they are

more definite, and cannot be so easily generalized. The conditions which

produce the spire of the cypress, and flaked breadth of the cedar, the

rounded head of the stone pine, and perfect pyramid of the black spruce,

are far more distinct, and would require more accurate and curious

diagrams to illustrate them, than the graceful, but in some degree

monotonous branching of leaf-builders. In broad principle they are,

however, alike. The leaves construct the sprays in the same accumulative

way: the only essential difference being that in the sword-builders the

leaves are all set close, and at equal intervals. Instead of admitting

extended and variable spaces between them, the whole spray is one tower

of leaf-roots, set in a perfect spiral. Thus, Fig. 71, at A, represents

a fragment of spray of Scotch fir of its real size. B is the same piece

magnified, the diamond-like spaces being the points on which the leaves

grew. The dotted lines show the regularity of the spiral. As the minor

stems join in boughs, the scars left by the leaves are gradually

effaced, and a thick but broken and scaly bark forms instead.

§ 2. A sword-builder may therefore be generally considered as a

shield-builder put under the severest military restraint. The graceful

and thin leaf is concentrated into a strong, narrow, pointed rod; and

the insertion of these rods on them is in a close and perfectly timed

order. In some ambiguous trees connected with the tribe (as the arbor

vitæ) there is no proper stem to the outer leaves, but all the

extremities form a kind of coralline leaf, flat and fern-like, but

articulated like a crustacean animal, which gradually concentrates and

embrowns itself into the stem. The thicker branches of these trees are

exquisitely fantastic; and the mode in which the flat system of leaf

first produces an irregular branch, and then adapts itself to the

symmetrical cone of the whole tree, is one of the most interesting

processes of form which I know in vegetation.

§ 3. Neither this, however, nor any other of the pine formations, have

we space here to examine in detail; while without detail, all discussion

of them is in vain. I shall only permit myself to note a few points

respecting my favorite tree, the black spruce, not with any view to art

criticism (though we might get at some curious results by a comparison

of popular pine-drawing in Germany, America, and other dark-wooded

countries, with the true natural forms), but because I think the

expression of this tree has not been rightly understood by travellers in

Switzerland, and that, with a little watching of it, they might easily

obtain a juster feeling.

§ 4. Of the many marked adaptations of nature to the mind of man, it

seems one of the most singular, that trees intended especially for the

adornment of the wildest mountains should be in broad outline the most

formal of trees. The vine, which is to be the companion of man, is

waywardly docile in its growth, falling into festoons beside his

cornfields, or roofing his garden-walks, or casting its shadow all

summer upon his door. Associated always with the trimness of

cultivation, it introduces all possible elements of sweet wildness. The

pine, placed nearly always among scenes disordered and desolate, brings

into them all possible elements of order and precision. Lowland trees

may lean to this side and that, though it is but a meadow breeze that

bends them, or a bank of cowslips from which their trunks lean aslope.

But let storm and avalanche do their worst, and let the pine find only a

ledge of vertical precipice to cling to, it will nevertheless grow

straight. Thrust a rod from its last shoot down the stem;--it shall

point to the centre of the earth as long as the tree lives.

§ 5. Also it may be well for lowland branches to reach hither and

thither for what they need, and to take all kinds of irregular shape and

extension. But the pine is trained to need nothing, and to endure

everything. It is resolvedly whole, self-contained, desiring nothing but

rightness, content with restricted completion. Tall or short, it will be

straight. Small or large, it will be round. It may be permitted also to

these soft lowland trees that they should make themselves gay with show

of blossom, and glad with pretty charities of fruitfulness. We builders

with the sword have harder work to do for man, and must do it in

close-set troops. To stay the sliding of the mountain snows, which would

bury him; to hold in divided drops, at our sword-points, the rain, which

would sweep away him and his treasure-fields; to nurse in shade among

our brown fallen leaves the tricklings that feed the brooks in drought;

to give massive shield against the winter wind, which shrieks through

the bare branches of the plain:--such service must we do him steadfastly

while we live. Our bodies, also, are at his service: softer than the

bodies of other trees, though our toil is harder than theirs. Let him

take them as pleases him, for his houses and ships. So also it may be

well for these timid lowland trees to tremble with all their leaves, or

turn their paleness to the sky, if but a rush of rain passes by them; or

to let fall their leaves at last, sick and sere. But we pines must live

carelessly amidst the wrath of clouds. We only wave our branches to and

fro when the storm pleads with us, as men toss their arms in a dream.

And finally, these weak lowland trees may struggle fondly for the last

remnants of life, and send up feeble saplings again from their roots

when they are cut down. But we builders with the sword perish boldly;

our dying shall be perfect and solemn, as our warring: we give up our

lives without reluctance, and for ever.[1]

§ 6. I wish the reader to fix his attention for a moment on these two

great characters of the pine, its straightness and rounded perfectness;

both wonderful, and in their issue lovely, though they have hitherto

prevented the tree from being drawn. I say, first, its straightness.

Because we constantly see it in the wildest scenery, we are apt to

remember only as characteristic examples of it those which have been

disturbed by violent accident or disease. Of course such instances are

frequent. The soil of the pine is subject to continual change; perhaps

the rock in which it is rooted splits in frost and falls forward,

throwing the young stems aslope, or the whole mass of earth around it is

undermined by rain, or a huge boulder falls on its stem from above, and

forces it for twenty years to grow with weight of a couple of tons

leaning on its side. Hence, especially at edges of loose cliffs, about

waterfalls, or at glacier banks, and in other places liable to

disturbance, the pine may be seen distorted and oblique; and in Turner's

"Source of the Arveron," he has, with his usual unerring perception of

the main point in any matter, fastened on this means of relating the

glacier's history. The glacier cannot explain its own motion; and

ordinary observers saw in it only its rigidity; but Turner saw that the

wonderful thing was its non-rigidity. Other ice is fixed, only this ice

stirs. All the banks are staggering beneath its waves, crumbling and

withered as by the blast of a perpetual storm. He made the rocks of his

foreground loose--rolling and tottering down together; the pines,

smitten aside by them, their tops dead, bared by the ice wind.

§ 7. Nevertheless, this is not the truest or universal expression of the

pine's character. I said long ago, even of Turner: "Into the spirit of

the pine he cannot enter." He understood the glacier at once; he had

seen the force of sea on shore too often to miss the action of those

crystal-crested waves. But the pine was strange to him, adverse to his

delight in broad and flowing line; he refused its magnificent erectness.

Magnificent!--nay, sometimes, almost terrible. Other trees, tufting crag

or hill, yield to the form and sway of the ground, clothe it with soft

compliance, are partly its subjects, partly its flatterers, partly its

comforters. But the pine rises in serene resistance, self-contained; nor

can I ever without awe stay long under a great Alpine cliff, far from

all house or work of men, looking up to its companies of pine, as they

stand on the inaccessible juts and perilous ledges of the enormous wall,

in quiet multitudes, each like the shadow of the one beside it--upright,

fixed, spectral, as troops of ghosts standing on the walls of Hades, not

knowing each other--dumb for ever. You cannot reach them, cannot cry to

them;--those trees never heard human voice; they are far above all sound

but of the winds. No foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs. All

comfortless they stand, between the two eternities of the Vacancy and

the Rock: yet with such iron will, that the rock itself looks bent and

shattered beside them--fragile, weak, inconsistent, compared to their

dark energy of delicate life, and monotony of enchanted

pride:--unnumbered, unconquerable.

§ 8. Then note, farther, their perfectness. The impression on most

people's minds must have been received more from pictures than reality,

so far as I can judge;--so ragged they think the pine; whereas its chief

character in health is green and full roundness. It stands compact, like

one of its own cones, slightly curved on its sides, finished and quaint

as a carved tree in some Elizabethan garden; and instead of being wild

in expression, forms the softest of all forest scenery; for other trees

show their trunks and twisting boughs: but the pine, growing either in

luxuriant mass or in happy isolation, allows no branch to be seen.

Summit behind summit rise its pyramidal ranges, or down to the very

grass sweep the circlets of its boughs; so that there is nothing but

green cone and green carpet. Nor is it only softer, but in one sense

more cheerful than other foliage; for it casts only a pyramidal shadow.

Lowland forest arches overhead, and chequers the ground with darkness;

but the pine, growing in scattered groups, leaves the glades between

emerald-bright. Its gloom is all its own; narrowing into the sky, it

lets the sunshine strike down to the dew. And if ever a superstitious

feeling comes over me among the pine-glades, it is never tainted with

the old German forest fear; but is only a more solemn tone of the fairy

enchantment that haunts our English meadows; so that I have always

called the prettiest pine glade in Chamouni, "Fairies' Hollow." It is in

the glen beneath the steep ascent above Pont Pelissier, and may be

reached by a little winding path which goes down from the top of the

hill; being, indeed, not truly a glen, but a broad ledge of moss and

turf, leaning in a formidable precipice (which, however, the gentle

branches hide) over the Arve. An almost isolated rock promontory,

many-colored, rises at the end of it. On the other sides it is bordered

by cliffs, from which a little cascade falls, literally down among the

pines, for it is so light, shaking itself into mere showers of seed

pearl in the sun, that the pines don't know it from mist, and grow

through it without minding. Underneath, there is only the mossy silence,

and above, for ever, the snow of the nameless Aiguille.

§ 9. And then the third character which I want you to notice in the pine

is its exquisite fineness. Other trees rise against the sky in dots and

knots, but this in fringes.[2] You never see the edges of it, so subtle

are they; and for this reason, it alone of trees, so far as I know, is

capable of the fiery change which we saw before had been noticed by

Shakespeare. When the sun rises behind a ridge crested with pine,

provided the ridge be at a distance of about two miles, and seen clear,

all the trees, for about three or four degrees on each side of the sun,

become trees of light, seen in clear flame against the darker sky, and

dazzling as the sun itself. I thought at first this was owing to the

actual lustre of the leaves; but I believe now it is caused by the

cloud-dew upon them,--every minutest leaf carrying its diamond. It seems

as if these trees, living always among the clouds, had caught part of

their glory from them; and themselves the darkest of vegetation, could

yet add splendor to the sun itself.

§ 10. Yet I have been more struck by their character of finished

delicacy at a distance from the central Alps, among the pastoral hills

of the Emmenthal, or lowland districts of Berne, where they are set in

groups between the cottages, whose shingle roofs (they also of pine) of

deep gray blue, and lightly carved fronts, golden and orange in the

autumn sunshine,[3] gleam on the banks and lawns of hill-side,--endless

lawns, mounded, and studded, and bossed all over with deeper green

hay-heaps, orderly set, like jewellery (the mountain hay, when the

pastures are full of springs, being strangely dark and fresh in verdure

for a whole day after it is cut). And amidst this delicate delight of

cottage and field, the young pines stand delicatest of all, scented as

with frankincense, their slender stems straight as arrows, and crystal

white, looking as if they would break with a touch, like needles; and

their arabesques of dark leaf pierced through and through by the pale

radiance of clear sky, opal blue, where they follow each other along the

soft hill-ridges, up and down.

§ 11. I have watched them in such scenes with the deeper interest,

because of all trees they have hitherto had most influence on human

character. The effect of other vegetation, however great, has been

divided by mingled species; elm and oak in England, poplar in France,

birch in Scotland, olive in Italy and Spain, share their power with

inferior trees, and with all the changing charm of successive

agriculture. But the tremendous unity of the pine absorbs and moulds the

life of a race. The pine shadows rest upon a nation. The Northern

peoples, century after century, lived under one or other of the two

great powers of the Pine and the Sea, both infinite. They dwelt amidst

the forests, as they wandered on the waves, and saw no end, nor any

other horizon;--still the dark green trees, or the dark green waters,

jagged the dawn with their fringe, or their foam. And whatever elements

of imagination, or of warrior strength, or of domestic justice, were

brought down by the Norwegian and the Goth against the dissoluteness or

degradation of the South of Europe, were taught them under the green

roofs and wild penetralia of the pine.

§ 12. I do not attempt, delightful as the task would be, to trace this

influence (mixed with superstition) in Scandinavia, or North Germany;

but let us at least note it in the instance which we speak of so

frequently, yet so seldom take to heart. There has been much dispute

respecting the character of the Swiss, arising out of the difficulty

which other nations had to understand their simplicity. They were

assumed to be either romantically virtuous, or basely mercenary, when in

fact they were neither heroic nor base, but were true-hearted men,

stubborn with more than any recorded stubbornness; not much regarding

their lives, yet not casting them causelessly away; forming no high

ideal of improvement, but never relaxing their grasp of a good they had

once gained; devoid of all romantic sentiment, yet loving with a

practical and patient love that neither wearied nor forsook; little

given to enthusiasm in religion, but maintaining their faith in a purity

which no worldliness deadened and no hypocrisy soiled; neither

chivalrously generous nor pathetically humane, yet never pursuing their

defeated enemies, nor suffering their poor to perish: proud, yet not

allowing their pride to prick them into unwary or unworthy quarrel;

avaricious, yet contentedly rendering to their neighbor his due; dull,

but clear-sighted to all the principles of justice; and patient, without

ever allowing delay to be prolonged by sloth, or forbearance by fear.

§ 13. This temper of Swiss mind, while it animated the whole

confederacy, was rooted chiefly in one small district which formed the

heart of their country, yet lay not among its highest mountains. Beneath

the glaciers of Zermatt and Evolena, and on the scorching slopes of the

Valais, the peasants remained in an aimless torpor, unheard of but as

the obedient vassals of the great Bishopric of Sion. But where the lower

ledges of calcareous rock were broken by the inlets of the Lake Lucerne,

and bracing winds penetrating from the north forbade the growth of the

vine, compelling the peasantry to adopt an entirely pastoral life, was

reared another race of men. Their narrow domain should be marked by a

small green spot on every map of Europe. It is about forty miles from

east to west; as many from north to south: yet on that shred of rugged

ground, while every kingdom of the world around it rose or fell in fatal

change, and every multitudinous race mingled or wasted itself in various

dispersion and decline, the simple shepherd dynasty remained changeless.

There is no record of their origin. They are neither Goths, Burgundians,

Romans, nor Germans. They have been for ever Helvetii, and for ever

free. Voluntarily placing themselves under the protection of the House

of Hapsburg, they acknowledged its supremacy, but resisted its

oppression; and rose against the unjust governors it appointed over

them, not to gain, but to redeem, their liberties. Victorious in the

struggle by the Lake of Egeri, they stood the foremost standard-bearers

among the nations of Europe in the cause of loyalty and life--loyalty in

its highest sense, to the laws of God's helpful justice, and of man's

faithful and brotherly fortitude.

§ 14. You will find among them, as I said, no subtle wit nor high

enthusiasm, only an undeceivable common sense, and an obstinate

rectitude. They cannot be persuaded into their duties, but they feel

them; they use no phrases of friendship, but do not fail you at your

need. Questions of creed, which other nations sought to solve by logic

or reverie, these shepherds brought to practical tests: sustained with

tranquillity the excommunication of abbots who wanted to feed their

cattle on other people's fields, and, halbert in hand, struck down the

Swiss Reformation, because the Evangelicals of Zurich refused to send

them their due supplies of salt. Not readily yielding to the demands of

superstition, they were patient under those of economy; they would

purchase the remission of taxes, but not of sins; and while the sale of

indulgences was arrested in the church of Ensiedlen as boldly as at the

gates of Wittenberg, the inhabitants of the valley of Frütigen[4] ate no

meat for seven years, in order peacefully to free themselves and their

descendants from the seigniorial claims of the Baron of Thurm.

§ 15. What praise may be justly due to this modest and rational virtue,

we have perhaps no sufficient grounds for defining. It must long remain

questionable how far the vices of superior civilization may be atoned

for by its achievements, and the errors of more transcendental devotion

forgiven to its rapture. But, take it for what we may, the character of

this peasantry is, at least, serviceable to others and sufficient for

their own peace; and in its consistency and simplicity, it stands alone

in the history of the human heart. How far it was developed by

circumstances of natural phenomena may also be disputed; nor should I

enter into such dispute with any strongly held conviction. The Swiss

have certainly no feelings respecting their mountains in anywise

correspondent to ours. It was rather as fortresses of defence, than as

spectacles of splendor, that the cliffs of the Rothstock bare rule over

the destinies of those who dwelt at their feet; and the training for

which the mountain children had to thank the slopes of the Muotta-Thal,

was in soundness of breath, and steadiness of limb, far more than in

elevation of idea. But the point which I desire the reader to note is,

that the character of the scene which, if any, appears to have been

impressive to the inhabitant, is not that which we ourselves feel when

we enter the district. It was not from their lakes, nor their cliffs,

nor their glaciers--though these were all peculiarly their possession,

that the three venerable cantons or states received their name. They

were not called the States of the Rock, nor the States of the Lake, but

the States of the _Forest_. And the one of the three which contains the

most touching record of the spiritual power of Swiss religion, in the

name of the convent of the "Hill of Angels," has, for its own, none but

the sweet childish name of "Under the Woods."

§ 16. And indeed you may pass under them if, leaving the most sacred

spot in Swiss history, the Meadow of the Three Fountains, you bid the

boatman row southward a little way by the shore of the Bay of Uri.

Steepest there on its western side, the walls of its rocks ascend to

heaven. Far, in the blue of evening, like a great cathedral pavement,

lies the lake in its darkness; and you may hear the whisper of

innumerable falling waters return from the hollows of the cliff, like

the voices of a multitude praying under their breath. From time to time

the beat of a wave, slow lifted, where the rocks lean over the black

depth, dies heavily as the last note of a requiem. Opposite, green with

steep grass, and set with chalet villages, the Fron-Alp rises in one

solemn glow of pastoral light and peace; and above, against the clouds

of twilight, ghostly on the gray precipice, stand, myriad by myriad, the

shadowy armies of the Unterwalden pine.[5]

I have seen that it is possible for the stranger to pass through this

great chapel, with its font of waters, and mountain pillars, and vaults

of cloud, without being touched by one noble thought, or stirred by any

sacred passion; but for those who received from its waves the baptism of

their youth, and learned beneath its rocks the fidelity of their

manhood, and watched amidst its clouds the likeness of the dream of

life, with the eyes of age--for these I will not believe that the

mountain shrine was built, or the calm of its forest-shadows guarded by

their God, in vain.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] "Croesus, therefore, having heard these things, sent word to the

people of Lampsacus that they should let Miltiades go; and, if not,

he would cut them down like a pine-tree."--_Herod._ vi. 37.

[2] Keats (as is his way) puts nearly all that may be said of the

pine into one verse, though they are only figurative pines of which

he is speaking. I have come to that pass of admiration for him now,

that I dare not read him, so discontented he makes me with my own

work: but others must not leave unread, in considering the influence

of trees upon the human soul, that marvellous ode to Psyche. Here is

the piece about pines:--

"Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane

In some untrodden region of my mind,

Where branchéd thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,

Instead of pines, shall murmur in the wind:

Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees

_Fledge the wild-ridged mountains_, steep by steep;

And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,

The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;

And in the midst of this wide quietness

A rosy sanctuary will I dress

With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,

With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,

With all the Gardener Fancy e'er could feign,

Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same.

And there shall be for thee all soft delight

That shadowy thought can win;

A bright torch, and a casement ope, at night,

To let the warm Love in."

[3] There has been much cottage-building about the hills lately, with

very pretty carving, the skill in which has been encouraged by

travellers; and the fresh-cut larch is splendid in color under rosy

sunlight.

[4] This valley is on the pass of the Gemmi in Canton Berne, but the

people are the same in temper as those of the Waldstetten.

[5] The cliff immediately bordering the lake is in Canton Uri: the

green hills of Unterwalden rise above. This is the grandest piece of

the shore of Lake Lucerne; the rocks near Tell's Chapel are neither

so lofty nor so precipitous.

CHAPTER X.

LEAVES MOTIONLESS.

§ 1. It will be remembered that our final inquiry was to be into the

sources of beauty in the tented plants, or flowers of the field; which

the reader may perhaps suppose one of no great difficulty, the beauty of

flowers being somewhat generally admitted and comprehended.

Admitted? yes. Comprehended? no; and, which is worse, in all its highest

characters, for many a day yet, incomprehensible: though with a little

steady application, I suppose we might soon know more than we do now

about the colors of flowers,--being tangible enough, and staying longer

than those of clouds. We have discovered something definite about colors

of opal and of peacock's plume; perhaps, also, in due time we may give

some account of that true gold (the only gold of intrinsic value) which

gilds buttercups; and understand how the spots are laid, in painting a

pansy.

Art is of interest, when we may win any of its secrets; but to such

knowledge the road lies not up brick streets. And howsoever that

flower-painting may be done, one thing is certain, it is not by

machinery.

§ 2. Perhaps, it may be thought, if we understood flowers better, we

might love them less.

We do not love them much, as it is. Few people care about flowers. Many,

indeed, are fond of finding a new shape of blossom, caring for it as a

child cares about a kaleidoscope. Many, also, like a fair service of

flowers in the greenhouse, as a fair service of plate on the table. Many

are scientifically interested in them, though even these in the

nomenclature rather than the flowers. And a few enjoy their gardens; but

I have never heard of a piece of land, which would let well on a

building lease, remaining unlet because it was a flowery piece. I have

never heard of parks being kept for wild hyacinths, though often of

their being kept for wild beasts. And the blossoming time of the year

being principally spring, I perceive it to be the mind of most people,

during that period, to stay in towns.

§ 3. A year or two ago, a keen-sighted and eccentrically-minded friend

of mine, having taken it into his head to violate this national custom,

and go to the Tyrol in spring, was passing through a valley near

Landech, with several similarly headstrong companions. A strange

mountain appeared in the distance, belted about its breast with a zone

of blue, like our English Queen. Was it a blue cloud? A blue horizontal

bar of the air that Titian breathed in youth, seen now far away, which

mortal might never breathe again? Was it a mirage--a meteor? Would it

stay to be approached? (ten miles of winding road yet between them and

the foot of its mountain.) Such questioning had they concerning it. My

keen-sighted friend alone maintained it to be substantial: whatever it

might be, it was not air, and would not vanish. The ten miles of road

were overpassed, the carriage left, the mountain climbed. It stayed

patiently, expanding still into richer breadth and heavenlier glow--a

belt of gentians. Such things may verily be seen among the Alps in

spring, and in spring only. Which being so, I observe most people prefer

going in autumn.

§ 4. Nevertheless, without any special affection for them, most of us,

at least, languidly consent to the beauty of flowers, and occasionally

gather them, and prefer them from among other forms of vegetation. This,

strange to say, is precisely what great painters do _not_.

Every other kind of object they paint, in its due place and office, with

respect;--but, except compulsorily and imperfectly, never flowers. A

curious fact, this! Here are men whose lives are spent in the study of

color, and the one thing they will not paint is a flower! Anything but

that. A furred mantle, a jewelled zone, a silken gown, a brazen corslet,

nay, an old leathern chair, or a wall-paper if you will, with utmost

care and delight;--but a flower by no manner of means, if avoidable.

When the thing has perforce to be done, the great painters of course do

it rightly. Titian, in his early work, sometimes carries a blossom or

two out with affection, as the columbines in our Bacchus and Ariadne.

So also Holbein. But in his later and mightier work, Titian will only

paint a fan or a wristband intensely, never a flower. In his portrait of

Lavinia, at Berlin, the roses are just touched finely enough to fill

their place, with no affection whatever, and with the most subdued red

possible; while in the later portrait of her, at Dresden, there are no

roses at all, but a belt of chased golden balls, on every stud of which

Titian has concentrated his strength, and I verily believe forgot the

face a little, so much has his mind been set on them.

§ 5. In Paul Veronese's Europa, at Dresden, the entire foreground is

covered with flowers, but they are executed with sharp and crude touches

like those of a decorative painter. In Correggio's paintings, at

Dresden, and in the Antiope of the Louvre, there are lovely pieces of

foliage, but no flowers. A large garland of oranges and lemons, with

their leaves, above the St. George, at Dresden, is connected

traditionally with the garlanded backgrounds of Ghirlandajo and

Mantegna, but the studious absence of flowers renders it almost

disagreeably ponderous. I do not remember any painted by Velasquez, or

by Tintoret, except compulsory Annunciation lilies. The flowers of

Rubens are gross and rude; those of Vandyck vague, slight, and subdued

in color, so as not to contend with the flesh. In his portraits of King

Charles's children, at Turin, an enchanting picture, there is a

rose-thicket, in which the roses seem to be enchanted the wrong way, for

their leaves are all gray, and the flowers dull brick-red. Yet it is

right.

§ 6. One reason for this is that all great men like their inferior forms

to follow and obey contours of large surfaces, or group themselves in

connected masses. Patterns do the first, leaves the last; but flowers

stand separately.

Another reason is that the beauty of flower-petals and texture can only

be seen by looking at it close; but flat patterns can be seen far off,

as well as gleaming of metal-work. All the great men calculate their

work for effect at some distance, and with that object, know it to be

lost time to complete the drawing of flowers. Farther, the forms of

flowers being determined, require a painful attention, and restrain the

fancy; whereas, in painting fur, jewels, or bronze, the color and touch

may be varied almost at pleasure, and without effort.

Again, much of what is best in flowers is inimitable in painting; and a

thoroughly good workman feels the feebleness of his means when he

matches them fairly with Nature, and gives up the attempt

frankly--painting the rose dull red, rather than trying to rival its

flush in sunshine.

And, lastly, in nearly all good landscape-painting, the breadth of

foreground included implies such a distance of the spectator from the

nearest object as must entirely prevent his seeing flower detail.

§ 7. There is, however, a deeper reason than all these; namely, that

flowers have no sublimity. We shall have to examine the nature of

sublimity in our following and last section, among other ideas of

relation. Here I only note the fact briefly, that impressions of awe and

sorrow being at the root of the sensation of sublimity, and the beauty

of separate flowers not being of the kind which connects itself with

such sensation, there is a wide distinction, in general, between

flower-loving minds and minds of the highest order. Flowers seem

intended for the solace of ordinary humanity: children love them; quiet,

tender, contented ordinary people love them as they grow; luxurious and

disorderly people rejoice in them gathered: They are the cottager's

treasure; and in the crowded town, mark, as with a little broken

fragment of rainbow, the windows of the workers in whose heart rests the

covenant of peace. Passionate or religious minds contemplate them with

fond, feverish intensity; the affection is seen severely calm in the

works of many old religious painters, and mixed with more open and true

country sentiment in those of our own pre-Raphaelites. To the child and

the girl, the peasant and the manufacturing operative, to the grisette

and the nun, the lover and monk, they are precious always. But to the

men of supreme power and thoughtfulness, precious only at times;

symbolically and pathetically often to the poets, but rarely for their

own sake. They fall forgotten from the great workmen's and soldiers'

hands. Such men will take, in thankfulness, crowns of leaves, or crowns

of thorns--not crowns of flowers.

§ 8. Some beautiful things have been done lately, and more beautiful are

likely to be done, by our younger painters, in representing blossoms of

the orchard and the field in mass and extent. I have had something to do

with the encouragement of this impulse; and truly, if pictures are to

be essentially imitative rather than inventive, it is better to spend

care in painting hyacinths than dead leaves, and roses rather than

stubble. Such work, however, as I stated in my first essay on this

subject, in the year 1851,[1] can only connect itself with the great

schools by becoming inventive instead of copyist; and for the most part,

I believe these young painters would do well to remember that the best

beauty of flowers being wholly inimitable, and their sweetest service

unrenderable by art, the picture involves some approach to an

unsatisfying mockery, in the cold imagery of what Nature has given to be

breathed with the profuse winds of spring, and touched by the happy

footsteps of youth.

§ 9. Among the greater masters, as I have said, there is little

laborious or affectionate flower-painting. The utmost that Turner ever

allows in his foregrounds is a water-lily or two, a cluster of heath or

foxglove, a thistle sometimes, a violet or daisy, or a bindweed-bell;

just enough to lead the eye into the understanding of the rich mystery

of his more distant leafage. Rich mystery, indeed, respecting which

these following facts about the foliage of tented plants must be noted

carefully.

§ 10. Two characters seem especially aimed at by Nature in the

earth-plants: first, that they should be characteristic and interesting;

secondly, that they should not be very visibly injured by crushing.

I say, first, characteristic. The leaves of large trees take

approximately simple forms, slightly monotonous. They are intended to be

seen in mass. But the leaves of the herbage at our feet take all kinds

of strange shapes, as if to invite us to examine them. Star-shaped,

heart-shaped, spear-shaped, arrow-shaped, fretted, fringed, cleft,

furrowed, serrated, sinuated; in whorls, in tufts, in spires, in wreaths

endlessly expressive, deceptive, fantastic, never the same from

footstalk to blossom; they seem perpetually to tempt our watchfulness,

and take delight in outstripping our wonder.

§ 11. Secondly, observe, their forms are such as will not be visibly

injured by crushing. Their complexity is already disordered: jags and

rents are their laws of being; rent by the footstep they betray no

harm. Here, for instance (Fig. 72), is the mere outline of a

buttercup-leaf in full free growth; which, perhaps, may be taken as a

good common type of earth foliage. Fig. 73 is a less advanced one,

placed so as to show its symmetrical bounding form. But both, how

various;--how delicately rent into beauty! As in the aiguilles of the

great Alps, so in this lowest field-herb, where rending is the law of

being, it is the law of loveliness.

[Illustration: FIG. 72.]

§ 12. One class, however, of these torn leaves, peculiar to the tented

plants, has, it seems to me, a strange expressional function. I mean the

group of leaves rent into _alternate_ gaps, typically represented by the

thistle. The alternation of the rent, if not absolutely, is

effectively, peculiar to the earth-plants. Leaves of the builders are

rent symmetrically, so as to form radiating groups, as in the

horse-chestnut, or they are irregularly sinuous, as in the oak; but the

earth-plants continually present forms such as those in the opposite

Plate: a kind of web-footed leaf, so to speak; a continuous tissue,

enlarged alternately on each side of the stalk. Leaves of this form have

necessarily a kind of limping gait, as if they grew not all at once, but

first a little bit on one side, and then a little bit on the other, and

wherever they occur in quantity, give the expression to foreground

vegetation which we feel and call "ragged."

[Illustration: FIG. 73.]

[Illustration: 60. The Rending of Leaves.]

§ 13. It is strange that the mere alternation of the rent should give

this effect; the more so, because alternate leaves, completely separate

from each other, produce one of the most graceful types of building

plants. Yet the fact is indeed so, that the alternate rent in the

earth-leaf is the principal cause of its ragged effect. However deeply

it may be rent symmetrically, as in the alchemilla, or buttercup, just

instanced, and however finely divided, as in the parsleys, the result is

always a delicate richness, unless the jags are alternate, and the

leaf-tissue continuous at the stem; and the moment these conditions

appear, so does the raggedness.

§ 14. It is yet more worthy of note that the proper duty of these

leaves, which catch the eye so clearly and powerfully, would appear to

be to draw the attention of man to spots where his work is needed, for

they nearly all habitually grow on ruins or neglected ground: not noble

ruins, or on _wild_ ground, but on heaps of rubbish, or pieces of land

which have been indolently cultivated or much disturbed. The leaf on the

right of the three in the Plate, which is the most characteristic of the

class, is that of the Sisymbrium Irio, which grows, by choice, always on

ruins left by fire. The plant, which, as far as I have observed, grows

first on earth that has been moved, is the colts-foot: its broad

covering leaf is much jagged, but only irregular, not alternate in the

rent; but the weeds that mark habitual neglect, such as the thistle,

give clear alternation.

§ 15. The aspects of complexity and carelessness of injury are farther

increased in the herb of the field, because it is "herb yielding seed;"

that is to say, a seed different in character from that which trees form

in their fruit.

I am somewhat alarmed in reading over the above sentence, lest a

botanist, or other scientific person, should open the book at it. For of

course the essential character of either fruit or seed being only that

in the smallest compass the vital principle of the plant is rendered

portable, and for some time, preservable, we ought to call every such

vegetable dormitory a "fruit" or a "seed" indifferently. But with

respect to man there is a notable difference between them.

A seed is what we "sow."

A fruit, what we "enjoy."

Fruit is seed prepared especially for the sight and taste of man and

animals; and in this sense we have true fruit and traitorous fruit

(poisonous); but it is perhaps the best available distinction,[2] that

seed being the part necessary for the renewed birth of the plant, a

fruit is such seed enclosed or sustained by some extraneous substance,

which is soft and juicy, and beautifully colored, pleasing and useful to

animals and men.

§ 16. I find it convenient in this volume, and wish I had thought of the

expedient before, whenever I get into a difficulty, to leave the reader

to work it out. He will perhaps, therefore, be so good as to define

fruit for himself. Having defined it, he will find that the sentence

about which I was alarmed above is, in the main, true, and that tented

plants principally are herb yielding seed, while building plants give

fruit. The berried shrubs of rock and wood, however dwarfed in stature,

are true builders. The strawberry-plant is the only important

exception--a tender Bedouin.

§ 17. Of course the principal reason for this is the plain, practical

one, that fruit should not be trampled on, and had better perhaps be put

a little out of easy reach than too near the hand, so that it may not be

gathered wantonly or without some little trouble, and may be waited for

until it is properly ripe: while the plants meant to be trampled on have

small and multitudinous seed, hard and wooden, which may be shaken and

scattered about without harm.

Also, fine fruit is often only to be brought forth with patience; not by

young and hurried trees--but in due time, after much suffering; and the

best fruit is often to be an adornment of old age, so as to supply the

want of other grace. While the plants which will not work, but only

bloom and wander, do not (except the grasses) bring forth fruit of high

service, but only the seed that prolongs their race, the grasses alone

having great honor put on them for their humility, as we saw in our

first account of them.

[Illustration: FIG. 74.]

[Illustration: FIG. 75.]

[Illustration: FIG. 76.]

[Illustration: FIG. 77.]

[Illustration: FIG. 78. _To face page 97._]

§ 18. This being so, we find another element of very complex effect

added to the others which exist in tented plants, namely, that of

minute, granular, feathery, or downy seed-vessels, mingling quaint brown

punctuation, and dusty tremors of dancing grain, with the bloom of the

nearer fields; and casting a gossamered grayness and softness of plumy

mist along their surfaces far away; mysterious evermore, not only with

dew in the morning or mirage at noon, but with the shaking threads of

fine arborescence, each a little belfry of grain-bells, all a-chime.

§ 19. I feel sorely tempted to draw one of these same spires of the fine

grasses, with its sweet changing proportions of pendent grain, but it

would be a useless piece of finesse, as such form of course never enters

into general foreground effect.[3] I have, however, engraved, at the top

of the group of woodcuts opposite (Fig. 74), a single leaf cluster of

Durer's foreground in the St. Hubert, which is interesting in several

ways; as an example of modern work, no less than old; for it is a

facsimile twice removed; being first drawn from the plate with the pen,

by Mr. Allen, and then facsimiled on wood by Miss Byfield; and if the

reader can compare it with the original, he will find it still come

tolerably close in most parts (though the nearest large leaf has got

spoiled), and of course some of the finest and most precious qualities

of Durer's work are lost. Still, it gives a fair idea of his perfectness

of conception, every leaf being thoroughly set in perspective, and drawn

with unerring decision. On each side of it (Figs. 75, 76) are two pieces

from a fairly good modern etching, which I oppose to the Durer in order

to show the difference between true work and that which pretends to give

detail, but is without feeling or knowledge. There are a great many

leaves in the piece on the left, but they are all set the same way; the

draughtsman has not conceived their real positions, but draws one after

another as he would deliver a tale of bricks. The grasses on the right

look delicate, but are a mere series of inorganic lines. Look how

Durer's grass-blades cross each other. If you take a pen and copy a

little piece of each example, you will soon feel the difference.

Underneath, in the centre (Fig. 77), is a piece of grass out of

Landseer's etching of the "Ladies' Pets," more massive and effective

than the two lateral fragments, but still loose and uncomposed. Then

underneath is a piece of firm and good work again, which will stand with

Durer's; it is the outline only of a group of leaves out of Turner's

foreground in the Richmond from the Moors, of which I give a reduced

etching, Plate 61, for the sake of the foreground principally, and in

Plate 62, the group of leaves in question, in their light and shade,

with the bridge beyond. What I have chiefly to say of them belongs to

our section on composition; but this mere fragment of a Turner

foreground may perhaps lead the reader to take note in his great

pictures of the almost inconceivable labor with which he has sought to

express the redundance and delicacy of ground leafage.

§ 20. By comparing the etching in Plate 61 with the published engraving,

it will be seen how much yet remains to be done before any approximately

just representation of Turner foreground can be put within the reach of

the public. This Plate has been reduced by Mr. Armytage from a

pen-drawing of mine, as large as the original of Turner's (18 inches by

11 inches). It will look a little better under a magnifying glass; but

only a most costly engraving, of the real size, could give any idea of

the richness of mossy and ferny leafage included in the real design. And

if this be so on one of the ordinary England drawings of a barren

Yorkshire moor, it may be imagined what the task would be of engraving

truly such a foreground as that of the "Bay of Baiæ" or "Daphne and

Leucippus," in which Turner's aim has been luxuriance.

[Illustration: 61. Richmond from the Moors.]

[Illustration: 62. By the Brookside.]

§ 21. His mind recurred, in all these classical foregrounds, to strong

impressions made upon him during his studies at Rome, by the masses of

vegetation which enrich its heaps of ruin with their embroidery and

bloom. I have always partly regretted these Roman studies, thinking that

they led him into too great fondness of pandering luxuriance in

vegetation, associated with decay; and prevented his giving

affection enough to the more solemn and more sacred infinity with which,

among the mightier ruins of the Alpine Rome, glow the pure and

motionless splendors of the gentian and the rose.

§ 22. Leaves motionless. The strong pines wave above them, and the weak

grasses tremble beside them; but the blue stars rest upon the earth with

a peace as of heaven; and far along the ridges of iron rock, moveless as

they, the rubied crests of Alpine rose flush in the low rays of morning.

Nor these yet the stillest leaves. Others there are subdued to a deeper

quietness, the mute slaves of the earth, to whom we owe, perhaps,

thanks, and tenderness, the most profound of all we have to render for

the leaf ministries.

§ 23. It is strange to think of the gradually diminished power and

withdrawn freedom among the orders of leaves--from the sweep of the

chestnut and gadding of the vine, down to the close shrinking trefoil,

and contented daisy, pressed on earth; and, at last, to the leaves that

are not merely close to earth, but themselves a part of it; fastened

down to it by their sides, here and there only a wrinkled edge rising

from the granite crystals. We have found beauty in the tree yielding

fruit, and in the herb yielding seed. How of the herb yielding _no_

seed,[4] the fruitless, flowerless lichen of the rock?

§ 24. Lichen, and mosses (though these last in their luxuriance are deep

and rich as herbage, yet both for the most part humblest of the green

things that live),--how of these? Meek creatures! the first mercy of the

earth, veiling with hushed softness its dintless rocks; creatures full

of pity, covering with strange and tender honor the scarred disgrace of

ruin,--laying quiet finger on the trembling stones, to teach them rest.

No words, that I know of, will say what these mosses are. None are

delicate enough, none perfect enough, none rich enough. How is one to

tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green,--the starred

divisions of rubied bloom, fine-filmed, as if the Rock Spirits could

spin porphyry as we do glass,--the traceries of intricate silver, and

fringes of amber, lustrous, arborescent, burnished through every fibre

into fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken change, yet all

subdued and pensive, and framed for simplest, sweetest offices of grace.

They will not be gathered, like the flowers, for chaplet or love-token;

but of these the wild bird will make its nest, and the wearied child his

pillow.

And, as the earth's first mercy, so they are its last gift to us. When

all other service is vain, from plant and tree, the soft mosses and gray

lichen take up their watch by the head-stone. The woods, the blossoms,

the gift-bearing grasses, have done their parts for a time, but these do

service for ever. Trees for the builder's yard, flowers for the bride's

chamber, corn for the granary, moss for the grave.

§ 25. Yet as in one sense the humblest, in another they are the most

honored of the earth-children. Unfading, as motionless, the worm frets

them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in lowliness, they neither

blanch in heat nor pine in frost. To them, slow-fingered,

constant-hearted, is entrusted the weaving of the dark, eternal,

tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-pencilled, iris-dyed, the tender

framing of their endless imagery. Sharing the stillness of the

unimpassioned rock, they share also its endurance; and while the winds

of departing spring scatter the white hawthorn blossom like drifted

snow, and summer dims on the parched meadow the drooping of its

cowslip-gold,--far above, among the mountains, the silver lichen-spots

rest, star-like, on the stone; and the gathering orange stain upon the

edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Pre-Raphaelitism._ The essay contains some important notes on

Turner's work, which, therefore, I do not repeat in this volume.

[2] I say the "best available distinction." It is, of course, no real

distinction. A peapod is a kind of central type of seed and

seed-vessel, and it is difficult so to define fruit as to keep clear

of it. Pea-shells are boiled and eaten in some countries rather than

pease. It does not sound like a scientific distinction to say that

fruit is a "shell which is good without being boiled." Nay, even if

we humiliate ourselves into this practical reference to the kitchen,

we are still far from success. For the pulp of a strawberry is not a

"shell," the seeds being on the outside of it. The available part of

a pomegranate or orange, though a seed envelope, is itself shut

within a less useful rind. While in an almond the shell becomes less

profitable still, and all goodness retires into the seed itself, as

in a grain of corn.

[3] For the same reason, I enter into no considerations respecting

the geometrical forms of flowers, though they are deeply interesting,

and perhaps some day I may give a few studies of them separately. The

reader should note, however, that beauty of form in flowers is

chiefly dependent on a more accurately finished or more studiously

varied development of the tre-foil, quatre-foil, and cinq-foil

structures which we have seen irregularly approached by leaf-buds.

The most beautiful six-foiled flowers (like the rhododendron-shoot)

are composed of two triangular groups, one superimposed on the other,

as in the narcissus; and the most interesting types both of six-foils

and cinq-foils are unequally leaved, symmetrical on opposite sides,

as the iris and violet.

[4] The reader must remember always that my work is concerning the

_aspects_ of things only. Of course, a lichen has seeds, just as

other plants have, but not effectually or visibly for man.

PART VII.

OF CLOUD BEAUTY.

CHAPTER I.

THE CLOUD-BALANCINGS.

§ 1. We have seen that when the earth had to be prepared for the

habitation of man, a veil, as it were, of intermediate being was spread

between him and its darkness, in which were joined, in a subdued

measure, the stability and insensibility of the earth, and the passion

and perishing of mankind.

But the heavens, also, had to be prepared for his habitation.

Between their burning light,--their deep vacuity, and man, as between

the earth's gloom of iron substance, and man, a veil had to be spread of

intermediate being;--which should appease the unendurable glory to the

level of human feebleness, and sign the changeless motion of the heavens

with a semblance of human vicissitude.

Between earth and man arose the leaf. Between the heaven and man came

the cloud. His life being partly as the falling leaf, and partly as the

flying vapor.

§ 2. Has the reader any distinct idea of what clouds are? We had some

talk about them long ago, and perhaps thought their nature, though at

that time not clear to us, would be easily enough understandable when we

put ourselves seriously to make it out. Shall we begin with one or two

easiest questions?

That mist which lies in the morning so softly in the valley, level and

white, through which the tops of the trees rise as if through an

inundation--why is _it_ so heavy? and why does it lie so low, being yet

so thin and frail that it will melt away utterly into splendor of

morning, when the sun has shone on it but a few moments more? Those

colossal pyramids, huge and firm, with outlines as of rocks, and

strength to bear the beating of the high sun full on their fiery

flanks--why are _they_ so light,--their bases high over our heads, high

over the heads of Alps? why will these melt away, not as the sun rises,

but as he descends, and leave the stars of twilight clear, while the

valley vapor gains again upon the earth like a shroud?

Or that ghost of a cloud, which steals by yonder clump of pines; nay,

which does _not_ steal by them, but haunts them, wreathing yet round

them, and yet--and yet, slowly: now falling in a fair waved line like a

woman's veil; now fading, now gone: we look away for an instant, and

look back, and it is again there. What has it to do with that clump of

pines, that it broods by them and weaves itself among their branches, to

and fro? Has it hidden a cloudy treasure among the moss at their roots,

which it watches thus? Or has some strong enchanter charmed it into fond

returning, or bound it fast within those bars of bough? And yonder filmy

crescent, bent like an archer's bow above the snowy summit, the highest

of all the hill,--that white arch which never forms but over the supreme

crest,--how is it stayed there, repelled apparently from the

snow--nowhere touching it, the clear sky seen between it and the

mountain edge, yet never leaving it--poised as a white bird hovers over

its nest?

Or those war-clouds that gather on the horizon, dragon-crested, tongued

with fire;--how is their barbed strength bridled? what bits are these

they are champing with their vaporous lips; flinging off flakes of black

foam? Leagued leviathans of the Sea of Heaven, out of their nostrils

goeth smoke, and their eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. The

sword of him that layeth at them cannot hold the spear, the dart, nor

the habergeon. Where ride the captains of their armies? Where are set

the measures of their march? Fierce murmurers, answering each other from

morning until evening--what rebuke is this which has awed them into

peace? what hand has reined them back by the way by which they came?

§ 3. I know not if the reader will think at first that questions like

these are easily answered. So far from it, I rather believe that some

of the mysteries of the clouds never will be understood by us at all.

"Knowest thou the balancings of the clouds?" Is the answer ever to be

one of pride? "The wondrous works of Him which is perfect in knowledge?"

Is _our_ knowledge ever to be so?

It is one of the most discouraging consequences of the varied character

of this work of mine, that I am wholly unable to take note of the

advance of modern science. What has conclusively been discovered or

observed about clouds, I know not; but by the chance inquiry possible to

me I find no book which fairly states the difficulties of accounting for

even the ordinary aspects of the sky. I shall, therefore, be able in

this section to do little more than suggest inquiries to the reader,

putting the subject in a clear form for him. All men accustomed to

investigation will confirm me in saying that it is a great step when we

are personally quite certain what we do _not_ know.

§ 4. First, then, I believe we do not know what makes clouds float.

Clouds are water, in some fine form or another; but water is heavier

than air, and the finest form you can give a heavy thing will not make

it float in a light thing. _On_ it, yes; as a boat: but _in_ it, no.

Clouds are not boats, nor boat-shaped, and they float in the air, not on

the top of it. "Nay, but though unlike boats, may they not be like

feathers? If out of quill substance there may be constructed eider-down,

and out of vegetable tissue, thistle-down, both buoyant enough for a

time, surely of water-tissue may be constructed also water-down, which

will be buoyant enough for all cloudy purposes." Not so. Throw out your

eider plumage in a calm day, and it will all come settling to the

ground: slowly indeed, to aspect; but practically so fast that all our

finest clouds would be here in a heap about our ears in an hour or two,

if they were only made of water-feathers. "But may they not be

quill-feathers, and have air inside them? May not all their particles be

minute little balloons?"

A balloon only floats when the air inside it is either specifically, or

by heating, lighter than the air it floats in. If the cloud-feathers had

warm air inside their quills, a cloud would be warmer than the air about

it, which it is not (I believe). And if the cloud-feathers had hydrogen

inside their quills, a cloud would be unwholesome for breathing, which

it is not--at least so it seems to me.

"But may they not have nothing inside their quills?" Then they would

rise, as bubbles do through water, just as certainly as, if they were

solid feathers, they would fall. All our clouds would go up to the top

of the air, and swim in eddies of cloud-foam.

"But is not that just what they do?" No. They float at different

heights, and with definite forms, in the body of the air itself. If they

rose like foam, the sky on a cloudy day would look like a very large

flat glass of champagne seen from below, with a stream of bubbles (or

clouds) going up as fast as they could to a flat foam-ceiling.

"But may they not be just so nicely mixed out of something and nothing,

as to float where they are wanted?"

Yes: that is just what they not only may, but must be: only this way of

mixing something and nothing is the very thing I want to explain or have

explained, and cannot do it, nor get it done.

§ 5. Except thus far. It is conceivable that minute hollow spherical

globules might be formed of water, in which the enclosed vacuity just

balanced the weight of the enclosing water, and that the arched sphere

formed by the watery film was strong enough to prevent the pressure of

the atmosphere from breaking it in. Such a globule would float like a

balloon at the height in the atmosphere where the equipoise between the

vacuum it enclosed, and its own excess of weight above that of the air,

was exact. It would, probably, approach its companion globules by

reciprocal attraction, and form aggregations which might be visible.

This is, I believe, the view usually taken by meteorologists. I state it

as a possibility, to be taken into account in examining the question--a

possibility confirmed by the scriptural words which I have taken for the

title of this chapter.

§ 6. Nevertheless, I state it as a possibility only, not seeing how any

known operation of physical law could explain the formation of such

molecules. This, however, is not the only difficulty. Whatever shape the

water is thrown into, it seems at first improbable that it should lose

its property of wetness. Minute division of rain, as in "Scotch mist,"

makes it capable of floating farther,[1] or floating up and down a

little, just as dust will float, though pebbles will not; or gold-leaf,

though a sovereign will not; but minutely divided rain wets as much as

any other kind, whereas a cloud, partially always, sometimes entirely,

loses its power of moistening. Some low clouds look, when you are in

them, as if they were made of specks of dust, like short hairs; and

these clouds are entirely dry. And also many clouds will wet some

substances, but not others. So that we must grant farther, if we are to

be happy in our theory, that the spherical molecules are held together

by an attraction which prevents their adhering to any foreign body, or

perhaps ceases only under some peculiar electric conditions.

§ 7. The question remains, even supposing their production accounted

for,--What intermediate states of water may exist between these

spherical hollow molecules and pure vapor?

Has the reader ever considered the relations of commonest forms of

volatile substance? The invisible particles which cause the scent of a

rose-leaf, how minute, how multitudinous, passing richly away into the

air continually! The visible cloud of frankincense--why visible? Is it

in consequence of the greater quantity, or larger size of the particles,

and how does the heat act in throwing them off in this quantity, or of

this size?

Ask the same questions respecting water. It dries, that is, becomes

volatile, invisibly, at (any?) temperature. Snow dries, as water does.

Under increase of heat, it volatilizes faster, so as to become dimly

visible in large mass, as a heat-haze. It reaches boiling point, then

becomes entirely visible. But compress it, so that no air shall get

between the watery particles--it is invisible again. At the first

issuing from the steam-pipe the steam is transparent; but opaque, or

visible, as it diffuses itself. The water is indeed closer, because

cooler, in that diffusion; but more air is between its particles. Then

this very question of visibility is an endless one, wavering between

form of substance and action of light. The clearest (or least visible)

stream becomes brightly opaque by more minute division in its foam, and

the clearest dew in hoar-frost. Dust, unperceived in shade, becomes

constantly visible in sunbeam; and watery vapor in the atmosphere, which

is itself opaque, when there is promise of fine weather, becomes

exquisitely transparent; and (questionably) blue, when it is going to

rain.

§ 8. Questionably blue: for besides knowing very little about water, we

know what, except by courtesy, must, I think, be called Nothing--about

air. Is it the watery vapor, or the air itself, which is blue? Are

neither blue, but only white, producing blue when seen over dark spaces?

If either blue, or white, why, when crimson is their commanded dress,

are the most distant clouds crimsonest? Clouds close to us may be blue,

but far off, golden,--a strange result, if the air is blue. And again,

if blue, why are rays that come through large spaces of it red; and that

Alp, or anything else that catches far-away light, why colored red at

dawn and sunset? No one knows, I believe. It is true that many

substances, as opal, are blue, or green, by reflected light, yellow by

transmitted; but air, if blue at all, is blue always by transmitted

light. I hear of a wonderful solution of nettles, or other unlovely

herb, which is green when shallow,--red when deep. Perhaps some day, as

the motion of the heavenly bodies by help of an apple, their light by

help of a nettle, may be explained to mankind.

§ 9. But farther: these questions of volatility, and visibility, and

hue, are all complicated with those of shape. How is a cloud outlined?

Granted whatever you choose to ask, concerning its material, or its

aspect, its loftiness and luminousness,--how of its limitation? What

hews it into a heap, or spins it into a web? Cold is usually shapeless,

I suppose, extending over large spaces equally, or with gradual

diminution. You cannot have, in the open air, angles, and wedges, and

coils, and cliffs of cold. Yet the vapor stops suddenly, sharp and steep

as a rock, or thrusts itself across the gates of heaven in likeness of a

brazen bar; or braids itself in and out, and across and across, like a

tissue of tapestry; or falls into ripples, like sand; or into waving

shreds and tongues, as fire. On what anvils and wheels is the vapor

pointed, twisted, hammered, whirled, as the potter's clay? By what hands

is the incense of the sea built up into domes of marble?

And, lastly, all these questions respecting substance, and aspect, and

shape, and line, and division, are involved with others as inscrutable,

concerning action. The curves in which clouds move are unknown;--nay,

the very method of their motion, or apparent motion, how far it is by

change of place, how far by appearance in one place and vanishing from

another. And these questions about movement lead partly far away into

high mathematics, where I cannot follow them, and partly into theories

concerning electricity and infinite space, where I suppose at present no

one can follow them.

What, then, is the use of asking the questions?

For my own part, I enjoy the mystery, and perhaps the reader may. I

think he ought. He should not be less grateful for summer rain, or see

less beauty in the clouds of morning, because they come to prove him

with hard questions; to which, perhaps, if we look close at the heavenly

scroll,[2] we may find also a syllable or two of answer illuminated here

and there.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The buoyancy of solid bodies of a given specific gravity, in a

given fluid, depends, first on their size, then on their forms.

First, on their size; that is to say, on the proportion of the

magnitude of the object (irrespective of the distribution of its

particles) to the magnitude of the particles of the air.

Thus, a grain of sand is buoyant in wind, but a large stone is not;

and pebbles and sand are buoyant in water in proportion to their

smallness, fine dust taking long to sink, while a large stone sinks

at once. Thus, we see that water may be arranged in drops of any

magnitude, from the largest rain-drop, about the size of a large pea,

to an atom so small as not to be separately visible, the smallest

rain passing gradually into mist. Of these drops of different sizes

(supposing the strength of the wind the same), the largest fall

fastest, the smaller drops are more buoyant, and the small misty rain

floats about like a cloud, as often up as down, so that an umbrella

is useless in it; though in a heavy thunder-storm, if there is no

wind, one may stand gathered up under an umbrella without a drop

touching the feet.

Secondly, buoyancy depends on the amount of surface which a given

weight of the substance exposes to the resistance of the substance it

floats in. Thus, gold-leaf is in a high degree buoyant, while the

same quantity of gold in a compact grain would fall like a shot; and

a feather is buoyant, though the same quantity of animal matter in a

compact form would be as heavy as a little stone. A slate blows far

from a house-top, while a brick falls vertically, or nearly so.

[2] There is a beautiful passage in _Sartor Resartus_ concerning this

old Hebrew scroll, in its deeper meanings, and the child's watching

it, though long illegible for him, yet "with an eye to the gilding."

It signifies in a word or two nearly all that is to be said about

clouds.

CHAPTER II.

THE CLOUD-FLOCKS.

§ 1. From the tenor of the foregoing chapter, the reader will, I hope,

be prepared to find me, though dogmatic (it is said) upon some

occasions, anything rather than dogmatic respecting clouds. I will

assume nothing concerning them, beyond the simple fact, that as a

floating sediment forms in a saturated liquid, vapor forms in the body

of the air; and all that I want the reader to be clear about in the

outset is that this vapor floats in and with the wind (as, if you throw

any thick coloring matter into a river, it floats with the stream), and

that it is not blown before a denser volume of the wind, as a fleece of

wool would be.

§ 2. At whatever height they form, clouds may be broadly considered as

of two species only, massive and striated. I cannot find a better word

than massive, though it is not a good one, for I mean it only to signify

a fleecy arrangement in which no _lines_ are visible. The fleece may be

so bright as to look like flying thistle-down, or so diffused as to show

no visible outline at all. Still if it is all of one common texture,

like a handful of wool, or a wreath of smoke, I call it massive.

On the other hand, if divided by parallel lines, so as to look more or

less like spun-glass, I call it striated. In Plate 69, Fig. 4, the top

of the Aiguille Dru (Chamouni) is seen emergent above low striated

clouds, with heaped massive cloud beyond. I do not know in the least

what causes this striation, except that it depends on the nature of the

cloud, not on the wind. The strongest wind will not throw a cloud,

massive by nature, into the linear form. It will toss it about, and tear

it to pieces, but not spin it into threads. On the other hand, often

without any wind at all, the cloud will spin itself into threads fine as

gossamer. These threads are often said to be a prognostic of storm; but

they are not produced by storm.

[Illustration: J. Ruskin J.C. Armytage

63. The Cloud-Flocks.]

§ 3. In the first volume, we considered all clouds as belonging to three

regions, that of the cirrous, the central cloud, and the rain-cloud. It

is of course an arrangement more of convenience than of true

description, for cirrous clouds sometimes form low as well as high; and

rain sometimes falls high as well as low. I will, nevertheless, retain

this old arrangement, which is practically as serviceable as any.

Allowing, also, for various exceptions and modifications, these three

bodies of cloud may be generally distinguished in our minds thus. The

clouds of upper region are for the most part quiet, or seem to be so,

owing to their distance. They are formed now of striated, now of massive

substance; but always finely divided into large ragged flakes or

ponderous heaps. These heaps (cumuli) and flakes, or drifts, present

different phenomena, but must be joined in our minds under the head of

central cloud. The lower clouds, bearing rain abundantly, are composed

partly of striated, partly of massive substance; but may generally be

comprehended under the term rain-cloud.

Our business in this chapter, then, is with the upper clouds, which,

owing to their quietness and multitude, we may perhaps conveniently

think of as the "cloud-flocks." And we have to discover if any laws of

beauty attach to them, such as we have seen in mountains or

tree-branches.

§ 4. On one of the few mornings of this winter, when the sky was clear,

and one of the far fewer, on which its clearness was visible from the

neighborhood of London,--which now entirely loses at least two out of

three sunrises, owing to the environing smoke,--the dawn broke beneath a

broad field of level purple cloud, under which floated ranks of divided

cirri, composed of finely striated vapor.

It was not a sky containing any extraordinary number of these minor

clouds; but each was more than usually distinct in separation from its

neighbor, and as they showed in nearly pure pale scarlet on the dark

purple ground, they were easily to be counted.

§ 5. There were five or six ranks, from the zenith to the horizon; that

is to say, three distinct ones, and then two or three more running

together, and losing themselves in distance, in the manner roughly shown

in Fig. 79. The nearest rank was composed of more than 150 rows of

cloud, set obliquely, as in the figure. I counted 150 which was near

the mark, and then stopped, lest the light should fail, to count the

separate clouds in some of the rows. The average number was 60 in each

row, rather more than less.

[Illustration: FIG. 79.]

There were therefore 150×60, that is, 9,000, separate clouds in this one

rank, or about 50,000 in the field of sight. Flocks of Admetus under

Apollo's keeping. Who else could shepherd such? He by day, dog Sirius by

night; or huntress Diana herself--her bright arrows driving away the

clouds of prey that would ravage her fair flocks. We must leave fancies,

however; these wonderful clouds need close looking at. I will try to

draw one or two of them before they fade.

§ 6. On doing which we find, after all, they are not much more like

sheep than Canis Major is like a dog. They resemble more some of our old

friends, the pine branches, covered with snow. The three forming the

uppermost figure, in the Plate opposite, are as like three of the fifty

thousand as I could get them, complex enough in structure, even this

single group. Busy workers they must be, that twine the braiding of them

all to the horizon, and down beyond it.

And who are these workers? You have two questions here, both difficult.

What separates these thousands of clouds each from the other, and each

about equally from the other? How can they be drawn asunder, yet not

allowed to part? Looped lace as it were, richest point--invisible

threads fastening embroidered cloud to cloud--the "plighted clouds" of

Milton,--creatures of the element--

"That in the colors of the rainbow live

And play in the plighted clouds."

Compare Geraldine dressing:--

"Puts on her silken vestments white,

And tricks her hair in lovely plight."

And Britomart's--

"Her well-plighted frock

She low let fall, that flowed from her lanck side

Down to her foot, with careless modesty."

And, secondly, what bends each of them into these flame-like curves,

tender and various, as motions of a bird, hither and thither? Perhaps

you may hardly see the curves well in the softly finished forms; here

they are plainer in rude outline, Fig. 80.[1]

[Illustration: FIG. 80.]

§ 7. What is it that throws them into these lines?

Eddies of wind?

Nay, an eddy of wind will not stay quiet for three minutes, as that

cloud did to be drawn; as all the others did, each in his place. You

see there is perfect harmony among the curves. They all flow into each

other as the currents of a stream do. If you throw dust that will float

on the surface of a slow river, it will arrange itself in lines somewhat

like these. To a certain extent, indeed, it is true that there are

gentle currents of change in the atmosphere, which move slowly enough to

permit in the clouds that follow them some appearance of stability. But

how to obtain change so complex in an infinite number of consecutive

spaces;--fifty thousand separate groups of current in half of a morning

sky, with quiet invisible vapor between, or none--and yet all obedient

to one ruling law, gone forth through their companies;--each marshalled

to their white standards, in great unity of warlike march, unarrested,

unconfused? "One shall not thrust another, they shall walk every one in

his own path."

[Illustration: FIG. 81.]

§ 8. These questions occur, at first sight, respecting every group of

cirrus cloud. Whatever the form may be, whether branched, as in this

instance, or merely rippled, or thrown into shield-like segments, as in

Fig. 81--a frequent arrangement--there is still the same difficulty in

accounting satisfactorily for the individual forces which regulate the

similar shape of each mass, while all are moved by a general force that

has apparently no influence on the divided structure. Thus the mass of

clouds disposed as in Fig. 81, will probably move, mutually, in the

direction of the arrow; that is to say, sideways, as far as their

separate curvature is concerned. I suppose it probable that as the

science of electricity is more perfectly systematized, the explanation

of many circumstances of cloud-form will be rendered by it. At present I

see no use in troubling the reader or myself with conjectures which a

year's progress in science might either effectively contradict or

supersede. All that I want is, that we should have our questions ready

to put clearly to the electricians when the electricians are ready to

answer us.

§ 9. It is possible that some of the loveliest conditions of these

parallel clouds may be owing to a structure which I forgot to explain,

when it occurred in rocks, in the course of the last volume.

[Illustration: FIG. 82.]

When they are finely stratified, and their surfaces abraded by broad,

shallow furrows, the edges of the beds, of course, are thrown into

undulations, and at some distance, where the furrows disappear, the

surface looks as if the rock had flowed over it in successive waves.

Such a condition is seen on the left at the top in Fig. 17, in Vol. IV.

Supposing a series of beds of vapor cut across by a straight sloping

current of air, and so placed as to catch the light on their edges, we

should have a series of curved lights, looking like independent clouds.

§ 10. I believe conditions of form like those in Fig. 82 (turn the book

with its outer edge down) may not unfrequently be thus, owing to

stratification, when they occur in the nearer sky. This line of cloud is

far off at the horizon, drifting towards the left (the points of course

forward), and is, I suppose, a series of nearly circular eddies seen in

perspective.

Which question of perspective we must examine a little before going a

step farther. In order to simplify it, let us assume that the under

surfaces of clouds are flat, and lie in a horizontal extended field.

This is in great measure the fact, and notable perspective phenomena

depend on the approximation of clouds to such a condition.

[Illustration: 64. Cloud Perspective. (Rectilinear.)]

[Illustration: 65. Cloud Perspective. (Curvilinear.)]

§ 11. Referring the reader to my Elements of Perspective for statements

of law which would be in this place tiresome, I can only ask him to take

my word for it that the three figures in Plate 64 represent limiting

lines of sky perspective, as they would appear over a large space of the

sky. Supposing that the breadth included was one-fourth of the horizon,

the shaded portions in the central figure represent square fields

of cloud,[2] and those in the uppermost figure narrow triangles, with

their shortest side next us, but sloping a little away from us.

In each figure, the shaded portions show the perspective limits of

cloud-masses, which, in reality, are arranged in perfectly straight

lines, are all similar, and are equidistant from each other. Their exact

relative positions are marked by the lines connecting them, and may be

determined by the reader if he knows perspective. If he does not, he may

be surprised at first to be told that the stubborn and blunt little

triangle, _b_, Fig. 1, Plate 64, represents a cloud precisely similar,

and similarly situated, to that represented by the thin triangle, _a_;

and, in like manner, the stout diamond, _a_, Fig. 2, represents

precisely the same form and size of cloud as the thin strip at _b_. He

may perhaps think it still more curious that the retiring perspective

which causes stoutness in the triangle, causes leanness in the

diamond.[3]

§ 12. Still greater confusion in aspect is induced by the apparent

change caused by perspective in the direction of the wind. If Fig. 3 be

supposed to include a quarter of the horizon, the spaces, into which its

straight lines divide it, represent squares of sky. The curved lines,

which cross these spaces from corner to corner, are precisely parallel

throughout; and, therefore, two clouds moving, one on the curved line

from _a_ to _b_, and the other on the other side, from _c_ to _d_,

would, in reality, be moving with the same wind, in parallel lines. In

Plate 66, which is a sketch of an actual sunset behind Beauvais

cathedral (the point of the roof of the apse, a little to the left of

the centre, shows it to be a summer sunset), the white cirri in the high

light are all moving eastward, away from the sun, in perfectly parallel

lines, curving a little round to the south. Underneath, are two straight

ranks of rainy cirri, crossing each other; one directed south-east; the

other, north-west. The meeting perspective of these, in extreme

distance, determines the shape of the angular light which opens above

the cathedral. Underneath all, fragments of true rain-cloud are floating

between us and the sun, governed by curves of their own. They are,

nevertheless, connected with the straight cirri, by the dark

semi-cumulus in the middle of the shade above the cathedral.

[Illustration: FIG. 83.]

§ 13. Sky perspective, however, remains perfectly simple, so long as it

can be reduced to any rectilinear arrangement; but when nearly the whole

system is curved, which nine times out of ten is the case, it becomes

embarrassing. The central figure in Plate 65 represents the simplest

possible combination of perspective of straight lines with that of

curves, a group of concentric circles of small clouds being supposed to

cast shadows from the sun near the horizon. Such shadows are often cast

in misty air; the aspect of rays about the sun being, in fact, only

caused by spaces between them. They are carried out formally and far in

the Plate, to show how curiously they may modify the arrangement of

light in a sky. The woodcut, Fig. 83, gives roughly the arrangement of

the clouds in Turner's Pools of Solomon, in which he has employed a

concentric system of circles of this kind, and thus lighted. In the

perspective figure the clouds are represented as small square masses,

for the sake of greater simplicity, and are so beaded or strung as it

were on the curves in which they move, as to keep their distances

precisely equal, and their sides parallel. This is the usual condition

of cloud: for though arranged in curved ranks, each cloud has its face

to the front, or, at all events, acts in some parallel line--generally

another curve--with those next to it: being rarely, except in the form

of fine radiating striæ, arranged on the curves as at _a_, Fig. 84; but

as at _b_, or _c_. It would make the diagram too complex if I gave one

of intersecting curves; but the lowest figure in Plate 65 represents, in

perspective, two groups of ellipses arranged in equidistant straight and

parallel lines, and following each other on two circular curves. Their

exact relative position is shown in Fig. 2, Plate 56. While the

uppermost figure in Plate 65 represents, in parallel perspective, a

series of ellipses arranged in radiation on a circle, their exact

relative size and position are shown in Fig. 3, Plate 56, and the lines

of such a sky as would be produced by them, roughly, in Fig. 90, facing

page 128.[4]

[Illustration: FIG. 84.]

§ 14. And in these figures, which, if we look up the subject rightly,

would be but the first and simplest of the series necessary to

illustrate the action of the upper cirri, the reader may see, at once,

how necessarily painters, untrained in observance of proportion, and

ignorant of perspective, must lose in every touch the expression of

buoyancy and space in sky. The absolute forms of each cloud are, indeed,

not alike, as the ellipses in the engraving; but assuredly, when moving

in groups of this kind, there are among them the same proportioned

inequalities of relative distance, the same gradated changes from

ponderous to elongated form, the same exquisite suggestions of

including curve; and a common painter, dotting his clouds down at

random, or in more or less equal masses, can no more paint a sky, than

he could, by random dashes for its ruined arches, paint the Coliseum.

§ 15. Whatever approximation to the character of upper clouds may have

been reached by some of our modern students, it will be found, on

careful analysis, that Turner stands more absolutely alone in this gift

of cloud-drawing, than in any other of his great powers. Observe, I say,

cloud-_drawing_; other great men colored clouds beautifully; none but he

ever drew them truly: this power coming from his constant habit of

drawing skies, like everything else, with the pencil point. It is quite

impossible to engrave any of his large finished skies on a small scale;

but the woodcut, Fig. 85, will give some idea of the forms of cloud

involved in one of his small drawings. It is only half of the sky in

question, that of Rouen from St. Catherine's Hill, in the Rivers of

France. Its clouds are arranged on two systems of intersecting circles,

crossed beneath by long bars very slightly bent. The form of every

separate cloud is completely studied; the manner of drawing them will be

understood better by help of the Plate opposite, which is a piece of the

sky above the "Campo Santo,"[5] at Venice, exhibited in 1842. It is

exquisite in rounding of the separate fragments and buoyancy of the

rising central group, as well as in its expression of the wayward

influence of curved lines of breeze on a generally rectilinear system of

cloud.

[Illustration: FIG. 85. _To face page 118._]

[Illustration: 67. Clouds.]

§ 16. To follow the subject farther would, however, lead us into

doctrine of circular storms, and all kinds of pleasant, but infinite,

difficulty, from which temptation I keep clear, believing that enough is

now stated to enable the reader to understand what he is to look for in

Turner's skies; and what kind of power, thought, and science are

involved continually in the little white or purple dashes of

cloud-spray, which, in such pictures as the San Benedetto, looking to

Fusina, the Napoleon, or the Temeraire, guide the eye to the horizon

more by their true perspective than by their aërial tone, and are

buoyant, not so much by expression of lightness as of motion.[6]

§ 17. I say the "white or purple" cloud-spray. One word yet may be

permitted me respecting the mystery of that color. What should we have

thought--if we had lived in a country where there were no clouds, but

only low mist or fog--of any stranger who had told us that, in his

country, these mists rose into the air, and became purple, crimson,

scarlet, and gold? I am aware of no sufficient explanation of these hues

of the upper clouds, nor of their strange mingling of opacity with a

power of absorbing light. All clouds are so opaque that, however

delicate they may be, you never see one through another. Six feet depth

of them, at a little distance, will wholly veil the darkest mountain

edge; so that, whether for light or shade, they tell upon the sky as

body color on canvas; they have always a perfect surface and

bloom;--delicate as a rose-leaf, when required of them, but never poor

or meagre in hue, like old-fashioned water-colors. And, if needed, in

mass, they will bear themselves for solid force of hue against any rock.

Facing p. 339, I have engraved a memorandum made of a clear sunset after

rain, from the top of Milan cathedral. The greater part of the outline

is granite--Monte Rosa--the rest cloud; but it and the granite were dark

alike. Frequently, in effects of this kind, the cloud is darker of the

two.[7] And this opacity is, nevertheless, obtained without destroying

the gift they have of letting broken light through them, so that,

between us and the sun, they may become golden fleeces, and float as

fields of light.

Now their distant colors depend on these two properties together;

partly on the opacity, which enables them to reflect light strongly;

partly on a spongelike power of gathering light into their bodies.

§ 18. Long ago it was noted by Aristotle, and again by Leonardo, that

vaporous bodies looked russet, or even red, when warm light was seen

through them, and blue when deep shade was seen through them. Both

colors may, generally, be seen on any wreath of cottage smoke.

Whereon, easy conclusion has sometimes been founded by modern reasoners.

All red in sky is caused by light seen through vapor, and all blue by

shade seen through vapor.

Easy, indeed, but not sure, even in cloud-color only. It is true that

the smoke of a town may be of a rich brick red against golden twilight;

and of a very lovely, though not bright, blue against shade. But I never

saw crimson or scarlet smoke, nor ultramarine smoke.

Even granting that watery vapor in its purity may give the colors more

clearly, the red colors are by no means always relieved against light.

The finest scarlets are constantly seen in broken flakes on a deep

purple ground of heavier cloud beyond, and some of the loveliest

rose-colors on clouds in the east, opposite the sunset, or in the west

in the morning. Nor are blues always attainable by throwing vapor over

shade. Especially, you cannot get them by putting it over blue itself. A

thin vapor on dark blue sky is of a warm gray, not blue. A

thunder-cloud, deep enough to conceal everything behind it, is often

dark lead-color, or sulphurous blue; but the thin vapors crossing it,

milky-white. The vividest hues are connected also with another attribute

of clouds, their lustre--metallic in effect, watery in reality. They not

only reflect color as dust or wool would, but, when far off, as water

would; sometimes even giving a distinct image of the sun underneath the

orb itself;--in all cases becoming dazzling in lustre, when at a low

angle, capable of strong reflection. Practically, this low angle is only

obtained when the cloud seems near the sun, and hence we get into the

careless habit of looking at the golden reflected light as if it were

actually caused by nearness to the fiery ball.

[Illustration: 66. Light in the West, Beauvais.]

§ 19. Without, however, troubling ourselves at all about laws, or causes

of color, the visible consequences of their operation are notably

these--that when near us, clouds present only subdued and uncertain

colors; but when far from us, and struck by the sun on their under

surfaces--so that the greater part of the light they receive is

reflected--they may become golden, purple, scarlet, and intense fiery

white, mingled in all kinds of gradations, such as I tried to describe

in the chapter on the upper clouds in the first volume, in hope of being

able to return to them "when we knew what was beautiful."

The question before us now is, therefore, What value ought this

attribute of clouds to possess in the human mind? Ought we to admire

their colors, or despise them? Is it well to watch them as Turner does,

and strive to paint them through all deficiency and darkness of

inadequate material? Or, is it wiser and nobler--like Claude, Salvator,

Ruysdael, Wouvermans--never to look for them--never to portray? We must

yet have patience a little before deciding this, because we have to

ascertain some facts respecting the typical meaning of color itself;

which, reserving for another place, let us proceed here to learn the

forms of the inferior clouds.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Before going farther, I must say a word or two respecting method

of drawing clouds.

Absolutely well no cloud _can_ be drawn with the point; nothing but

the most delicate management of the brush will express its variety of

edge and texture. By laborious and tender engraving, a close

approximation may be obtained either to nature or to good painting;

and the engravings of sky by our modern line engravers are often

admirable;--in many respects as good as can be, and to my mind the

best part of their work. There still exist some early proofs of

Miller's plate of the Grand Canal, Venice, in which the sky is the

likest thing to Turner's work I have ever seen in large engravings.

The plate was spoiled after a few impressions were taken off by

desire of the publisher. The sky was so exactly like Turner's that he

thought it would not please the public, and had all the fine

cloud-drawing rubbed away to make it soft.

The Plate opposite page 118, by Mr. Armytage, is also, I think, a

superb specimen of engraving, though in result not so good as the one

just spoken of, because this was done from my copy of Turner's sky,

not from the picture itself.

But engraving of this finished kind cannot, by reason of its

costliness, be given for every illustration of cloud form. Nor, if it

could, can skies be sketched with the completion which would bear it.

It is sometimes possible to draw one cloud out of fifty thousand with

something like fidelity before it fades. But if we want the

arrangement of the fifty thousand, they can only be indicated with

the rudest lines, and finished from memory. It was, as we shall see

presently, only by his gigantic powers of memory that Turner was

enabled to draw skies as he did.

Now, I look upon my own memory of clouds, or of anything else, as of

no value whatever. All the drawings on which I have ever rested an

assertion have been made without stirring from the spot; and in

sketching clouds from nature, it is very seldom desirable to use the

brush. For broad effects and notes of color (though these, hastily

made, are always inaccurate, and letters indicating the color do

nearly as well) the brush may be sometimes useful, but, in most

cases, a dark pencil, which will lay shade with its side and draw

lines with its point, is the best instrument. Turner almost always

outlined merely with the point, being able to remember the relations

of shade without the slightest chance of error. The point, at all

events, is needful, however much stump work may be added to it.

Now, in translating sketches made with the pencil point into

engraving, we must either engrave delicately and expensively, or be

content to substitute for the soft varied pencil lines the finer and

uncloudlike touches of the pen. It is best to do this boldly, if at

all, and without the least aim at fineness of effect, to lay down a

vigorous black line as the limit of the cloud form or action. The

more subtle a painter's finished work, the more fearless he is in

using the vigorous black line when he is making memoranda, of

treating his subject conventionally. At the top of page 224, Vol.

IV., the reader may see the kind of outline which Titian uses for

clouds in his pen work. Usually he is even bolder and coarser. And in

the rude woodcuts I am going to employ here, I believe the reader

will find ultimately that, with whatever ill success used by me, the

means of expression are the fullest and most convenient that can be

adopted, short of finished engraving, while there are some conditions

of cloud-action which I satisfy myself better in expressing by these

coarse lines than in any other way.

[2] If the figures are supposed to include less than one-fourth of

the horizon, the shaded figures represent diamond-shaped clouds; but

the reader cannot understand this without studying perspective laws

accurately.

[3] In reality, the retiring ranks of cloud, if long enough, would,

of course, go on converging to the horizon. I do not continue them,

because the figures would become too compressed.

[4] I use ellipses in order to make these figures easily

intelligible; the curves actually _are_ variable curves, of the

nature of the cycloid, or other curves of continuous motion; probably

produced by a current moving in some such direction as that indicated

by the dotted line in Fig. 3, Plate 56.

[5] Now in the possession of E. Bicknell, Esq., who kindly lent me

the picture, that I might make this drawing from it carefully.

[6] I cannot yet engrave these; but the little study of a single rank

of cirrus, the lowest in Plate 63, may serve to show the value of

perspective in expressing buoyancy. It is not, however, though

beautifully engraved by Mr. Armytage, as delicate as it should be, in

the finer threads which indicate increasing distance at the

extremity. Compare the rising of the lines of curve at the edges of

this mass, with the similar action on a larger scale, of Turner's

cloud, opposite.

[7] In the autobiography of John Newton there is an interesting

account of the deception of a whole ship's company by cloud, taking

the aspect and outline of mountainous land. They ate the last

provision in the ship, so sure were they of its being land, and were

nearly starved to death in consequence.

CHAPTER III.

THE CLOUD-CHARIOTS.

§ 1. Between the flocks of small countless clouds which occupy the

highest heavens, and the gray undivided film of the true rain-cloud,

form the fixed masses or torn fleeces, sometimes collected and calm,

sometimes fiercely drifting, which are, nevertheless, known under one

general name of cumulus, or heaped cloud.

The true cumulus, the most majestic of all clouds, and almost the only

one which attracts the notice of ordinary observers, is for the most

part windless; the movement of its masses being solemn, continuous,

inexplicable, a steady advance or retiring, as if they were animated by

an inner will, or compelled by an unseen power. They appear to be

peculiarly connected with heat, forming perfectly only in the afternoon,

and melting away in the evening. Their noblest conditions are strongly

electric, and connect themselves with storm-cloud and true

thunder-cloud. When there is thunder in the air, they will form in cold

weather, or early in the day.

§ 2. I have never succeeded in drawing a cumulus. Its divisions of

surface are grotesque and endless, as those of a mountain;--perfectly

defined, brilliant beyond all power of color, and transitory as a dream.

Even Turner never attempted to paint them, any more than he did the

snows of the high Alps.

Nor can I explain them any more than I can draw them. The ordinary

account given of their structure is, I believe, that the moisture raised

from the earth by the sun's heat becomes visible by condensation at a

certain height in the colder air, that the level of the condensing point

is that of the cloud's base, and that above it, the heaps are pushed up

higher and higher as more vapor accumulates, till, towards evening, the

supply beneath ceases; and at sunset, the fall of dew enables the

surrounding atmosphere to absorb and melt them away. Very plausible.

But it seems to me herein unexplained how the vapor is held together in

those heaps. If the clear air about and above it has no aqueous vapor in

it, or at least a much less quantity, why does not the clear air keep

pulling the cloud to pieces, eating it away, as steam is consumed in

open air? Or, if any cause prevents such rapid devouring of it, why does

not the aqueous vapor diffuse itself softly in the air like smoke, so

that one would not know where the cloud ended? What should make it bind

itself in those solid mounds, and stay so:--positive, fantastic,

defiant, determined?

§ 3. If ever I am able to understand the process of the cumulus

formation,[1] it will become to me one of the most interesting of all

subjects of study to trace the connection of the threatening and

terrible outlines of thunder-cloud with the increased action of the

electric power. I am for the present utterly unable to speak respecting

this matter, and must pass it by, in all humility, to say what little I

have ascertained respecting the more broken and rapidly moving forms of

the central clouds, which connect themselves with mountains, and may,

therefore, among mountains, be seen close and truly.

§ 4. Yet even of these, I can only reason with great doubt and continual

pause. This last volume ought certainly to be better than the first of

the series, for two reasons. I have learned, during the sixteen years,

to say little where I said much, and to see difficulties where I saw

none. And I am in a great state of marvel in looking back to my first

account of clouds, not only at myself, but even at my dear master, M. de

Saussure. To think that both of us should have looked at drifting

mountain clouds, for years together, and been content with the theory

which you will find set forth in § 4, of the chapter on the central

cloud region (Vol. I.), respecting the action of the snowy summits and

watery vapor passing them. It is quite true that this action takes

place, and that the said fourth paragraph is right, as far as it

reaches. But both Saussure and I ought to have known--we both did know,

but did not think of it--that the covering or cap-cloud forms on hot

summits as well as cold ones;--that the red and bare rocks of Mont

Pilate, hotter, certainly, after a day's sunshine than the cold

storm-wind which sweeps to them from the Alps, nevertheless have been

renowned for their helmet of cloud, ever since the Romans watched the

cloven summit, gray against the south, from the ramparts of Vindonissa,

giving it the name from which the good Catholics of Lucerne have warped

out their favorite piece of terrific sacred biography.[2] And both my

master and I should also have reflected, that if our theory about its

formation had been generally true, the helmet cloud ought to form on

every cold summit, at the approach of rain, in approximating proportions

to the bulk of the glaciers; which is so far from being the case that

not only (A) the cap-cloud may often be seen on lower summits of grass

or rock, while the higher ones are splendidly clear (which may be

accounted for by supposing the wind containing the moisture not to have

risen so high), but (B) the cap-cloud always shows a preference for

hills of a conical form, such as the Mole or Niesen, which can have very

little power in chilling the air, even supposing they were cold

themselves, while it will entirely refuse to form round huge masses of

mountain, which, supposing them of chilly temperament, must have

discomforted the atmosphere in their neighborhood for leagues. And

finally (C) reversing the principle under letter A, the cap-cloud

constantly forms on the summit of Mont Blanc, while it will obstinately

refuse to appear on the Dome du Goûte or Aiguille Sans-nom, where the

snow-fields are of greater extent, and the air must be moister, because

lower.

[Illustration: J. Ruskin. J. C. Armytage.

69. Aiguilles and their Friends.]

[Illustration: FIG. 86.]

§ 5. The fact is, that the explanation given in that fourth paragraph

can, in reality, account only for what may properly be termed "lee-side

cloud," slightly noticed in the continuation of the same chapter, but

deserving most attentive illustration, as one of the most beautiful

phenomena of the Alps. When a moist wind blows in clear weather over a

cold summit, it has not time to get chilled as it approaches the

rock, and therefore the air remains clear, and the sky bright on the

windward side; but under the lee of the peak, there is partly a back

eddy, and partly still air; and in that lull and eddy the wind gets time

to be chilled by the rock, and the cloud appears as a boiling mass of

white vapor, rising continually with the return current to the upper

edge of the mountain, where it is caught by the straight wind, and

partly torn, partly melted away in broken fragments. In Fig. 86 the dark

mass represents the mountain peak, the arrow the main direction of the

wind, the curved lines show the directions of such current and its

concentration, and the dotted lines enclose the space in which cloud

forms densely, floating away beyond and above in irregular tongues and

flakes. The second figure from the top in Plate 69 represents the actual

aspect of it when in full development, with a strong south wind, in a

clear day, on the Aiguille Dru, the sky being perfectly blue and lovely

around.

So far all is satisfactory. But the true helmet cloud will not allow

itself to be thus explained away. The uppermost figure in Plate 69

represents the loveliest form of it, seen in that perfect arch, so far

as I know, only over the highest piece of earth in Europe.

§ 6. Respecting which there are two mysteries:--First, why it should

form only at a certain distance above the snow, showing blue sky between

it and the summit. Secondly, why, so forming, it should always show as

an arch, not as a concave cup. This last question puzzles me especially.

For, if it be a true arch, and not a cup, it ought to show itself in

certain positions of the spectator, or directions of the wind, like the

ring of Saturn, as a mere line, or as a spot of cloud pausing over the

hill-top. But I never saw it so. While, as above noticed, the lowest

form of the helmet cloud is not white as of silver, but like Dolon's

helmet of wolf-skin,--it is a gray, flaky veil, lapping itself over the

shoulders of a more or less conical peak; and of this, also, I have no

word to utter but the old one, "Electricity," and I might as well say

nothing.

§ 7. Neither the helmet cloud, nor the lee-side cloud, however, though

most interesting and beautiful, are of much importance in picturesque

effect. They are too isolated and strange. But the great mountain cloud,

which seems to be a blending of the two with independent forms of vapor

(that is to say, a greater development, in consequence of the mountain's

action, of clouds which would in some way or other have formed

anywhere), requires prolonged attention, as the principal element of the

sky in noblest landscape.

§ 8. For which purpose, first, it may be well to clear a few clouds out

of the way. I believe the true cumulus is never seen in a great mountain

region, at least never associated with hills. It is always broken up and

modified by them. Boiling and rounded masses of vapor occur continually,

as behind the Aiguille Dru (lowest figure in Plate 69); but the quiet,

thoroughly defined, infinitely divided and modelled pyramid never

develops itself. It would be very grand if one ever saw a great mountain

peak breaking through the domed shoulders of a true cumulus; but this I

have never seen.

§ 9. Again, the true high cirri never cross a mountain in Europe. How

often have I hoped to see an Alp rising through and above their

level-laid and rippled fields! but those white harvest-fields are

heaven's own. And, finally, even the low, level, cirrus (used so largely

in Martin's pictures) rarely crosses a mountain. If it does, it usually

becomes slightly waved or broken, so as to destroy its character.

Sometimes, however, at great distances, a very level bar of cloud will

strike across a peak; but nearer, too much of the under surface of the

field is seen, so that a well-defined bar across a peak, seen at a high

angle, is of the greatest rarity.

[Illustration: J. Ruskin. J. C. Armytage.

70. The Graiæ.]

[Illustration: 71. "Venga Medusa."]

[Illustration: FIG. 87. _To face page 127._]

§ 10. The ordinary mountain cloud, therefore, if well defined, divides

itself into two kinds: a broken condition of cumulus, grand in

proportion as it is solid and quiet,--and a strange modification of

drift-cloud, midway, as I said, between the helmet and the lee-side

forms. The broken, quiet cumulus impressed Turner exceedingly when he

first saw it on hills. He uses it, slightly exaggerating its

definiteness, in all his early studies among the mountains of the

Chartreuse, and very beautifully in the vignette of St. Maurice in

Rogers's Italy. There is nothing, however, to be specially observed of

it, as it only differs from the cumulus of the plains, by being smaller

and more broken.

§ 11. Not so the mountain drift-cloud, which is as peculiar as it is

majestic. The Plates 70 and 71 show, as well as I can express, two

successive phases of it on a mountain crest; (in this instance the great

limestone ridge above St. Michel, in Savoy.) But what colossal

proportions this noble cloud assumes may be best gathered from the rude

sketch, Fig. 87, in which I have simply put firm black ink over the

actual pencil lines made at the moment, giving the form of a single

wreath of the drift-cloud, stretching about five miles in a direct line

from the summit of one of the Alps of the Val d'Aosta, as seen from the

plain of Turin. It has a grand volcanic look, but I believe its aspect

of rising from the peak to be almost, if not altogether, deceptive; and

that the apparently gigantic column is a nearly horizontal stream of

lee-side cloud, tapered into the distance by perspective, and thus

rising at its apparently lowest but in reality most distant point, from

the mountain summit whose shade calls it into being out of the clear

winds.

Whether this be so or not, the apparent origin of the cloud on the peak,

and radiation from it, distinguish it from the drift-cloud of level

country, which arranges itself at the horizon in broken masses, such as

Fig. 89, showing no point of origin; and I do not know how far they are

vertical cliffs or horizontally extended fields. They are apt to be very

precipitous in aspect, breaking into fragments with an apparently

concentric motion, as in the figure; but of this motion also--whether

vertical or horizontal--I can say nothing positive.

§ 12. The absolute scale of such clouds may be seen, or at least

demonstrated, more clearly in Fig. 88, which is a rough note of an

effect of sky behind the tower of Berne Cathedral. It was made from the

mound beside the railroad bridge. The Cathedral tower is half-a-mile

distant. The great Eiger of Grindelwald is seen just on the right of it.

This mountain is distant from the tower thirty-four miles as the crow

flies, and ten thousand feet above it in height. The drift-cloud behind

it, therefore, being in full light, and showing no overhanging

surfaces, must rise at least twenty thousand feet into the air.

§ 13. The extreme whiteness of the volume of vapor in this case (not, I

fear, very intelligible in the woodcut[3]) may be partly owing to recent

rain, which, by its evaporation, gives a peculiar density and brightness

to some forms of clearing cloud. In order to understand this, we must

consider another set of facts. When weather is thoroughly wet among

hills, we ought no more to accuse the mountains of forming the clouds,

than we do the plains in similar circumstances. The unbroken mist buries

the mountains to their bases; but that is not their fault. It may be

just as wet and just as cloudy elsewhere. (This is not true of Scottish

mountain, by the way.) But when the wet weather is breaking, and the

clouds pass, perhaps, in great measure, away from the plains leaving

large spaces of blue sky, the mountains begin to shape clouds for

themselves. The fallen moisture evaporates from the plain invisibly; but

not so from the hill-side. There, what quantity of rain has not gone

down in the torrents, ascends again to heaven instantly in white clouds.

The storm passes as if it had tormented the crags, and the strong

mountains smoke like tired horses.

§ 14. Here is another question for us of some interest. Why does the

much greater quantity of moisture lying on the horizontal fields send up

no visible vapor, and the less quantity left on the rocks glorify itself

into a magnificent wreath of soaring snow?

First, for the very reason, that it is less in quantity, and more

distributed; as a wet cloth smokes when you put it near the fire, but a

basin of water not.

[Illustration: FIG. 88.]

[Illustration: FIG. 89.]

[Illustration: FIG. 90. _To face page 128._]

The previous heat of the crags, noticed in the first volume, p. 249, is

only a part of the cause. It operates only locally, and on remains of

sudden showers. But after any number of days and nights of rain, and in

all places exposed to returning sunshine and breezes, the _distribution_

of the moisture tells. So soon as the rain has ceased, all water that

can run off is of course gone from the steep hill-sides; there remains

only the thin adherent film of moisture to be dried; but that film is

spread over a complex texture--all manner of crannies, and bosses, and

projections, and filaments of moss and lichen, exposing a vast extent of

drying surface to the air. And the evaporation is rapid in proportion.

§ 15. Its rapidity, however, observe, does not account for its

visibility, and this is one of the questions I cannot clearly solve,

unless I were sure of the nature of the vesicular vapor. When our breath

becomes visible on a frosty day, it is easily enough understood that the

moisture which was invisible, carried by the warm air from the lungs,

becomes visible when condensed or precipitated by the surrounding chill;

but one does not see why air passing over a moist surface quite as cold

as itself should take up one particle of water more than it can

conveniently--that is to say, invisibly--carry. Whenever you _see_

vapor, you may not inaccurately consider the air as having got more than

it can properly hold, and dropping some. Now it is easily understood how

it should take up much in the lungs, and let some of it fall when it is

pinched by the frost outside; but why should it overload itself there on

the hills, when it is at perfect liberty to fly away as soon as it

likes, and come back for more? I do not see my way well in this. I do

not see it clearly, even through the wet cloth. I shall leave all the

embarrassment of the matter, however, to my reader, contenting myself,

as usual, with the actual fact, that the hill-side air does behave in

this covetous and unreasonable manner; and that, in consequence, when

the weather is breaking (and sometimes, provokingly, when it is not),

phantom clouds form and rise in sudden crowds of wild and spectral

imagery along all the far succession of the hill-slopes and ravines.

[Illustration: FIG. 91.]

§ 16. There is this distinction, however, between the clouds that form

during the rain and after it. In the worst weather, the rain-cloud keeps

rather high, and is unbroken; but when there is a disposition in the

rain to relax, every now and then a sudden company of white clouds will

form quite low down (in Chamouni or Grindelwald, and such high

districts, even down to the bottom of the valley), which will remain,

perhaps, for ten minutes, filling all the air, then disappear as

suddenly as they came, leaving the gray upper cloud and steady rain to

their work. These "clouds of relaxation," if we may so call them, are

usually flaky and horizontal, sometimes tending to the silky cirrus, yet

showing no fine forms of drift; but when the rain has passed, and the

air is getting warm, forms the true clearing cloud, in wreaths that

ascend continually with a slow circling motion, melting as they rise.

The woodcut, Fig. 91, is a rude note of it floating more quietly from

the hill of the Superga, the church (nearly as large as St. Paul's)

appearing above, and thus showing the scale of the wreath.

[Illustration: FIG. 92.]

§ 17. This cloud of evaporation, however, does not always rise. It

sometimes rests in absolute stillness, low laid in the hollows of the

hills, their peaks emergent from it. Fig. 92 shows this condition of it,

seen from a distance, among the Cenis hills. I do not know what gives it

this disposition to rest in the ravines, nor whether there is a greater

chill in the hollows, or a real action of gravity on the particles of

cloud. In general, the position seems to depend on the temperature.

Thus, in Chamouni, the crests of La Côte and Taconay continually appear

in stormy weather as in Plate 36, Vol. IV., in which I intended to

represent rising drift-cloud, made dense between the crests by the chill

from the glaciers. But in the condition shown in Fig. 92, on a

comparatively open sweep of hill-side, the thermometer would certainly

indicate a higher temperature in the sheltered valley than on the

exposed peaks; yet the cloud still subsides into the valleys like folds

of a garment; and, more than this, sometimes conditions of morning

cloud, dependent, I believe, chiefly on dew evaporation, form first on

the _tops_ of the soft hills of wooded Switzerland, and droop down in

rent fringes, and separate tongues, clinging close to all the

hill-sides, and giving them exactly the appearance of being covered with

white fringed cloth, falling over them in torn or divided folds. It

always looks like a true action of gravity. How far it is, in reality,

the indication of the power of the rising sun causing evaporation, first

on the hill-top, and then in separate streams, by its divided light on

the ravines, I cannot tell. The subject is, as the reader perceives,

always inextricably complicated by these three necessities--that to get

a cloud in any given spot, you must have moisture to form the material

of it, heat to develop it, and cold[4] to show it; and the adverse

causes inducing the moisture, the evaporation, and the visibility are

continually interchanged in presence and in power. And thus, also, the

phenomena which properly belong to a certain elevation are confused,

among hills at least, with those which in plains would have been lower

or higher.

I have been led unavoidably in this chapter to speak of some conditions

of the rain-cloud; nor can we finally understand the forms even of the

cumulus, without considering those into which it descends or diffuses

itself. Which, however, being, I think, a little more interesting than

our work hitherto, we will leave this chapter to its dulness, and begin

another.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] One of the great difficulties in doing this is to distinguish the

portions of cloud outline which really slope upwards from those which

only appear to do so, being in reality horizontal, and thrown into

apparent inclination by perspective.

[2] _Pileatus_, capped (strictly speaking, with the cap of

liberty;--stormy cloud enough sometimes on men's brows as well as on

mountains), corrupted into Pilatus, and Pilate.

[3] I could not properly illustrate the subject of clouds without

numbers of these rude drawings, which would probably offend the

general reader by their coarseness, while the cost of engraving them

in facsimile is considerable, and would much add to the price of the

book. If I find people at all interested in the subject, I may,

perhaps, some day systematize and publish my studies of cloud

separately. I am sorry not to have given in this volume a careful

study of a rich cirrus sky, but no wood-engraving that I can employ

on this scale will express the finer threads and waves.

[4] We might say light, as well as cold; for it wholly depends on the

degree of light in the sky how far delicate cloud is seen.

The second figure from the top in Plate 69 shows an effect of morning

light on the range of the Aiguille Bouchard (Chamouni). Every crag

casts its shadow up into apparently clear sky. The shadow is, in such

cases, a bluish gray, the color of clear sky; and the defining light

is caused by the sunbeams showing mist which otherwise would have

been unperceived. The shadows are not irregular enough in

outline--the sketch was made for their color and sharpness, not their

shape,--and I cannot now put them right, so I leave them as they were

drawn at the moment.

CHAPTER IV.

THE ANGEL OF THE SEA.

§ 1. Perhaps the best and truest piece of work done in the first volume

of this book, was the account given in it of the rain-cloud; to which I

have here little, descriptively, to add. But the question before us now

is, not who has drawn the rain-cloud best, but if it were worth drawing

at all. Our English artists naturally painted it often and rightly; but

are their pictures the better for it? We have seen how mountains are

beautiful; how trees are beautiful; how sun-lighted clouds are

beautiful; but can rain be beautiful?

I spoke roughly of the Italian painters in that chapter, because they

could only draw distinct clouds, or violent storms, "massive

concretions," while our northern painters could represent every phase of

mist and fall of shower.

But is this indeed so delightful? Is English wet weather, indeed, one of

the things which we should desire to see Art give perpetuity to?

Yes, assuredly. I have given some reasons for this answer in the fifth

chapter of last volume; one or two, yet unnoticed, belong to the present

division of our subject.

§ 2. The climates or lands into which our globe is divided may, with

respect to their fitness for Art, be perhaps conveniently ranged under

five heads:--

1. Forest-lands, sustaining the great mass of the magnificent vegetation

of the tropics, for the most part characterized by moist and unhealthy

heat, and watered by enormous rivers, or periodical rains. This country

cannot, I believe, develop the mind or art of man. He may reach great

subtlety of intellect, as the Indian, but not become learned, nor

produce any noble art, only a savage or grotesque form of it. Even

supposing the evil influences of climate could be vanquished, the

scenery is on too large a scale. It would be difficult to conceive of

groves less fit for academic purposes than those mentioned by Humboldt,

into which no one can enter except under a stout wooden shield, to avoid

the chance of being killed by the fall of a nut.

2. Sand-lands, including the desert and dry-rock plains of the earth,

inhabited generally by a nomade population, capable of high mental

cultivation and of solemn monumental or religious art, but not of art in

which pleasurableness forms a large element, their life being

essentially one of hardship.

3. Grape and wheat lands, namely, rocks and hills, such as are good for

the vine, associated with arable ground forming the noblest and best

ground given to man. In these districts only art of the highest kind

seems possible, the religious art of the sand-lands being here joined

with that of pleasure or sense.

4. Meadow-lands, including the great pastoral and agricultural districts

of the North, capable only of an inferior art: apt to lose its

spirituality and become wholly material.

5. Moss-lands, including the rude forest-mountain and ground of the

North, inhabited by a healthy race, capable of high mental cultivation

and moral energy, but wholly incapable of art, except savage, like that

of the forest-lands, or as in Scandinavia.

We might carry out these divisions into others, but these are I think

essential, and easily remembered in a tabular form; saying "wood"

instead of "forest," and "field" for "meadow," we can get such a form

shortly worded:--

Wood-lands Shrewd intellect No art.

Sand-lands High intellect Religious art.

Vine-lands Highest intellect Perfect art.

Field-lands High intellect Material art.

Moss-lands Shrewd intellect No art.

§ 3. In this table the moss-lands appear symmetrically opposed to the

wood-lands, which in a sort they are; the too diminutive vegetation

under bleakest heaven, opposed to the too colossal under sultriest

heaven, while the perfect ministry of the elements, represented by bread

and wine, produces the perfect soul of man.

But this is not altogether so. The moss-lands have one great advantage

over the forest-lands, namely, sight of the sky.

And not only sight of it, but continual and beneficent help from it.

What they have to separate them from barren rock, namely, their moss and

streams, being dependent on its direct help, not on great rivers coming

from distant mountain chains, nor on vast tracts of ocean-mist coming up

at evening, but on the continual play and change of sun and cloud.

§ 4. Note this word "change." The moss-lands have an infinite advantage,

not only in sight, but in liberty; they are the freest ground in all the

world. You can only traverse the great woods by crawling like a lizard,

or climbing like a monkey--the great sands with slow steps and veiled

head. But bare-headed, and open-eyed, and free-limbed, commanding all

the horizon's space of changeful light, and all the horizon's compass of

tossing ground, you traverse the moss-land. In discipline it is severe

as the desert, but it is a discipline compelling to action; and the

moss-lands seem, therefore, the rough schools of the world, in which its

strongest human frames are knit and tried, and so bent down, like the

northern winds, to brace and brighten the languor into which the repose

of more favored districts may degenerate.

§ 5. It would be strange, indeed, if there were no beauty in the

phenomena by which this great renovating and purifying work is done. And

it is done almost entirely by the great Angel of the Sea--rain;--the

Angel, observe, the messenger sent to a special place on a special

errand. Not the diffused perpetual presence of the burden of mist, but

the going and returning of intermittent cloud. All turns upon that

intermittence. Soft moss on stone and rock;--cave-fern of tangled glen;

wayside well--perennial, patient, silent, clear; stealing through its

square font of rough-hewn stone; ever thus deep--no more--which the

winter wreck sullies not, the summer thirst wastes not, incapable of

stain as of decline--where the fallen leaf floats undecayed, and the

insect darts undefiling. Cressed brook and ever-eddying river, lifted

even in flood scarcely over its stepping-stones,--but through all sweet

summer keeping tremulous music with harp-strings of dark water among the

silver fingering of the pebbles. Far away in the south the strong river

Gods have all hasted, and gone down to the sea. Wasted and burning,

white furnaces of blasting sand, their broad beds lie ghastly and bare;

but here the soft wings of the Sea Angel droop still with dew, and the

shadows of their plumes falter on the hills: strange laughings, and

glitterings of silver streamlets, born suddenly, and twined about the

mossy heights in trickling tinsel, answering to them as they wave.[1]

§ 6. Nor are those wings colorless. We habitually think of the

rain-cloud only as dark and gray; not knowing that we owe to it perhaps

the fairest, though not the most dazzling of the hues of heaven. Often

in our English mornings, the rain-clouds in the dawn form soft level

fields, which melt imperceptibly into the blue; or when of less extent,

gather into apparent bars, crossing the sheets of broader cloud above;

and all these bathed throughout in an unspeakable light of pure

rose-color, and purple, and amber, and blue; not shining, but

misty-soft; the barred masses, when seen nearer, composed of clusters or

tresses of cloud, like floss silk; looking as if each knot were a little

swathe or sheaf of lighted rain. No clouds form such skies, none are so

tender, various, inimitable. Turner himself never caught them.

Correggio, putting out his whole strength, could have painted them, no

other man.[2]

§ 7. For these are the robes of love of the Angel of the Sea. To these

that name is chiefly given, the "spreadings of the clouds," from their

extent, their gentleness, their fulness of rain. Note how they are

spoken of in Job xxxvi. v. 29-31. "By them judgeth he the people; he

giveth meat in abundance. With clouds he covereth the light.[3] He hath

hidden the light in his hands, and commanded that it should return. He

speaks of it to his friend; that it is his possession, and that he may

ascend thereto."

That, then, is the Sea Angel's message to God's friends; _that_, the

meaning of those strange golden lights and purple flushes before the

morning rain. The rain is sent to judge, and feed us; but the light is

the possession of the friends of God, and they may ascend

thereto,--where the tabernacle veil will cross and part its rays no

more.

§ 8. But the Angel of the Sea has also another message,--in the "great

rain of his strength," rain of trial, sweeping away ill-set foundations.

Then his robe is not spread softly over the whole heaven, as a veil, but

sweeps back from his shoulders, ponderous, oblique, terrible--leaving

his sword-arm free.

The approach of trial-storm, hurricane-storm, is indeed in its vastness

as the clouds of the softer rain. But it is not slow nor horizontal, but

swift and steep: swift with passion of ravenous winds; steep as slope of

some dark, hollowed hill. The fronting clouds come leaning forward, one

thrusting the other aside, or on; impatient, ponderous, impendent, like

globes of rock tossed of Titans--Ossa on Olympus--but hurled forward

all, in one wave of cloud-lava--cloud whose throat is as a sepulchre.

Fierce behind them rages the oblique wrath of the rain, white as ashes,

dense as showers of driven steel; the pillars of it full of ghastly

life; Rain-Furies, shrieking as they fly;--scourging, as with whips of

scorpions;--the earth ringing and trembling under them, heaven wailing

wildly, the trees stooped blindly down, covering their faces, quivering

in every leaf with horror, ruin of their branches flying by them like

black stubble.

§ 9. I wrote Furies. I ought to have written Gorgons. Perhaps the reader

does not know that the Gorgons are not dead, are ever undying. We shall

have to take our chance of being turned into stones by looking them in

the face, presently. Meantime, I gather what part of the great Greek

story of the Sea Angels, has meaning for us here.

Nereus, the God of the Sea, who dwells in it always (Neptune being the

God who rules it from Olympus), has children by the Earth; namely,

Thaumas, the father of Iris; that is, the "wonderful" or miracle-working

angel of the sea; Phorcys, the malignant angel of it (you will find him

degraded through many forms, at last, in the story of Sindbad, into the

Old Man of the Sea); Ceto, the deep places of the sea, meaning its bays

among rocks, therefore called by Hesiod "Fair-cheeked" Ceto; and

Eurybia, the tidal force or sway of the sea, of whom more hereafter.

§ 10. Phorcys and Ceto, the malignant angel of the sea, and the spirit

of its deep rocky places, have children, namely, first, Graiæ, the soft

rain-clouds. The Greeks had a greater dislike of storm than we have, and

therefore whatever violence is in the action of rain, they represented

by harsher types than we should--types given in one group by

Aristophanes (speaking in mockery of the poets): "This was the reason,

then, that they made so much talk about the fierce rushing of the moist

clouds, coiled in glittering; and the locks of the hundred-headed

Typhon; and the blowing storms; and the bent-clawed birds drifted on

the breeze, fresh, and aërial." Note the expression "bent-clawed birds."

It illustrates two characters of these clouds; partly their coiling

form; but more directly the way they tear down the earth from the

hill-sides; especially those twisted storm-clouds which in violent

action become the waterspout. These always strike at a narrow point,

often opening the earth on a hill-side into a trench as a great pickaxe

would (whence the Graiæ are said to have only one beak between them).

Nevertheless, the rain-cloud was, on the whole, looked upon by the

Greeks as beneficent, so that it is boasted of in the Oedipus Coloneus

for its perpetual feeding of the springs of Cephisus,[4] and elsewhere

often; and the opening song of the rain-clouds in Aristophanes is

entirely beautiful:--

"O eternal Clouds! let us raise into open sight our dewy existence, from

the deep-sounding Sea, our Father, up to the crests of the wooded hills,

whence we look down over the sacred land, nourishing its fruits, and

over the rippling of the divine rivers, and over the low murmuring bays

of the deep." I cannot satisfy myself about the meaning of the names of

the Graiæ--Pephredo and Enuo--but the epithets which Hesiod gives them

are interesting: "Pephredo, the well-robed; Enuo, the crocus-robed;"

probably, it seems to me, from their beautiful colors in morning.

§ 11. Next to the Graiæ, Phorcys and Ceto begat the Gorgons, which are

the true storm-clouds. The Graiæ have only one beak or tooth, but all

the Gorgons have tusks like boars; brazen hands (brass being the word

used for the metal of which the Greeks made their spears), and golden

wings.

Their names are "Steino" (straitened), of storms compressed into narrow

compass; "Euryale" (having wide threshing-floor), of storms spread over

great space; "Medusa" (the dominant), the most terrible. She is

essentially the highest storm-cloud; therefore the hail-cloud or cloud

of cold, her countenance turning all who behold it to stone. ("He

casteth forth his ice like morsels. Who can stand before his cold?") The

serpents about her head are the fringes of the hail, the idea of

coldness being connected by the Greeks with the bite of the serpent, as

with the hemlock.

§ 12. On Minerva's shield, her head signifies, I believe, the cloudy

coldness of knowledge, and its venomous character ("Knowledge puffeth

up." Compare Bacon in Advancement of Learning). But the idea of serpents

rose essentially from the change of form in the cloud as it broke; the

cumulus cloud not breaking into full storm till it is cloven by the

cirrus; which is twice hinted at in the story of Perseus; only we must

go back a little to gather it together.

Perseus was the son of Jupiter by Danaë, who being shut in a brazen

tower, Jupiter came to her in a shower of gold: the brazen tower being,

I think, only another expression for the cumulus or Medusa cloud; and

the golden rain for the rays of the sun striking it; but we have not

only this rain of Danaë's to remember in connection with the Gorgon, but

that also of the sieves of the Danaïdes, said to represent the provision

of Argos with water by their father Danaüs, who dug wells about the

Acropolis; nor only wells, but opened, I doubt not, channels of

irrigation for the fields, because the Danaïdes are said to have brought

the mysteries of Ceres from Egypt. And though I cannot trace the root of

the names Danaüs and Danaë, there is assuredly some farther link of

connection in the deaths of the lovers of the Danaïdes, whom they slew,

as Perseus Medusa. And again note, that when the father of Danaë,

Acrisius, is detained in Seriphos by storms, a disk thrown by Perseus is

carried _by the wind against his head_, and kills him; and lastly, when

Perseus cuts off the head of Medusa, from her blood springs Chrysaor,

"wielder of the golden sword," the Angel of the Lightning, and Pegasus,

the Angel of the "Wild Fountains," that is to say, the fastest flying or

lower rain-cloud; winged, but racing as upon the earth.

§ 13. I say, "wild" fountains; because the kind of fountain from which

Pegasus is named is especially the "fountain of the great deep" of

Genesis; sudden and furious, (cataracts of heaven, not windows, in the

Septuagint);--the mountain torrent caused by thunderous storm, or as our

"fountain"--a Geyser-like leaping forth of water. Therefore, it is the

deep and full source of streams, and so used typically of the source of

evils, or of passions; whereas the word "spring" with the Greeks is like

our "well-head"--a gentle issuing forth of water continually. But,

because both the lightning-fire and the gushing forth, as of a fountain,

are the signs of the poet's true power, together with perpetuity, it is

Pegasus who strikes the earth with his foot, on Helicon,[5] and causes

Hippocrene to spring forth--"the horse's well-head." It is perpetual;

but has, nevertheless, the Pegasean storm-power.

§ 14. Wherein we may find, I think, sufficient cause for putting honor

upon the rain-cloud. Few of us, perhaps, have thought, in watching its

career across our own mossy hills, or listening to the murmur of the

springs amidst the mountain quietness, that the chief masters of the

human imagination owed, and confessed that they owed, the force of their

noblest thoughts, not to the flowers of the valley, nor the majesty of

the hill, but to the flying cloud.

Yet they never saw it fly, as we may in our own England. So far, at

least, as I know the clouds of the south, they are often more terrible

than ours, but the English Pegasus is swifter. On the Yorkshire and

Derbyshire hills, when the rain-cloud is low and much broken, and the

steady west-wind fills all space with its strength,[6] the sun-gleams

fly like golden vultures: they are flashes rather than shinings; the

dark spaces and the dazzling race and skim along the acclivities, and

dart and dip from crag to dell, swallow-like;--no Graiæ these,--gray

and withered: Grey Hounds rather, following the Cerinthian stag with the

golden antlers.

§ 15. There is one character about these lower rain-clouds, partly

affecting all their connection with the upper sky, which I have never

been able to account for; that which, as before noticed, Aristophanes

fastened on at once for their distinctive character--their obliquity.

They always fly in an oblique position, as in the Plate opposite, which

is a careful facsimile of the first advancing mass of the rain-cloud in

Turner's Slave Ship. When the head of the cloud is foremost, as in this

instance, and rain falling beneath, it is easy to imagine that its

drops, increasing in size as they fall, may exercise some retarding

action on the wind. But the head of the cloud is not always first, the

base of it is sometimes advanced.[7] The only certainty is, that it will

not shape itself horizontally, its thin drawn lines and main contours

will always be oblique, though its motion is horizontal; and, which is

still more curious, their sloping lines are hardly ever modified in

their descent by any distinct retiring tendency or perspective

convergence. A troop of leaning clouds will follow one another, each

stooping forward at the same apparent slope, round a fourth of the

horizon.

§ 16. Another circumstance which the reader should note in this cloud of

Turner's, is the witch-like look of drifted or erected locks of hair at

its left side. We have just read the words of the old Greek poet: "Locks

of the hundred-headed Typhon;" and must remember that Turner's account

of this picture, in the Academy catalogue, was "Slaver throwing

overboard the Dead and Dying. _Typhoon_ coming on." The resemblance to

wildly drifted hair is stronger in the picture than in the engraving;

the gray and purple tints of torn cloud being relieved against golden

sky beyond.

[Illustration: 72. The Locks of Typhon.]

§ 17. It was not, however, as we saw, merely to locks of hair, but to

serpents, that the Greeks likened the dissolving of the Medusa cloud in

blood. Of that sanguine rain, or of its meaning, I cannot yet speak.

It is connected with other and higher types, which must be traced in

another place.[8]

But the likeness to serpents we may illustrate here. The two Plates

already given, 70 and 71 (at page 127), represent successive conditions

of the Medusa cloud on one of the Cenis hills (the great limestone

precipice above St. Michel, between Lanslebourg and St. Jean di

Maurienne).[9] In the first, the cloud is approaching, with the lee-side

cloud forming beyond it; in the second, it has approached, increased,

and broken, the Medusa serpents writhing about the central peak, the

rounded tops of the broken cumulus showing above. In this instance, they

take nearly the forms of flame; but when the storm is more violent, they

are torn into fragments, and magnificent revolving wheels of vapor are

formed, broken, and tossed into the air, as the grass is tossed in the

hay-field from the toothed wheels of the mowing-machine; perhaps, in

common with all other inventions of the kind, likely to bring more evil

upon men than ever the Medusa cloud did, and turn them more effectually

into stone.[10]

§ 18. I have named in the first volume the principal works of Turner

representing these clouds; and until I am able to draw them better, it

is useless to say more of them; but in connection with the subject we

have been examining, I should be glad if the reader could turn to the

engravings of the England drawings of Salisbury and Stonehenge. What

opportunities Turner had of acquainting himself with classical

literature, and how he used them, we shall see presently. In the

meantime, let me simply assure the reader that, in various byways, he

had gained a knowledge of most of the great Greek traditions, and that

he felt them more than he knew them; his mind being affected, up to a

certain point, precisely as an ancient painter's would have been, by

external phenomena of nature. To him, as to the Greek, the storm-clouds

seemed messengers of fate. He feared them, while he reverenced; nor does

he ever introduce them without some hidden purpose, bearing upon the

expression of the scene he is painting.

§ 19. On that plain of Salisbury, he had been struck first by its

widely-spacious pastoral life; and secondly, by its monuments of the two

great religions of England--Druidical and Christian.

He was not a man to miss the possible connection of these impressions.

He treats the shepherd life as a type of the ecclesiastical; and

composes his two drawings so as to illustrate both.

In the drawing of Salisbury, the plain is swept by rapid but not

distressful rain. The cathedral occupies the centre of the picture,

towering high over the city, of which the houses (made on purpose

smaller than they really are) are scattered about it like a flock of

sheep. The cathedral is surrounded by a great light. The storm gives way

at first in a subdued gleam over a distant parish church, then bursts

down again, breaks away into full light about the cathedral, and passes

over the city, in various sun and shade. In the foreground stands a

shepherd leaning on his staff, watching his flock--bare-headed; he has

given his cloak to a group of children, who have covered themselves up

with it, and are shrinking from the rain; his dog crouches under a bank;

his sheep, for the most part, are resting quietly, some coming up the

slope of the bank towards him.[11]

§ 20. The rain-clouds in this picture are wrought with a care which I

have never seen equalled in any other sky of the same kind. It is the

rain of blessing--abundant, but full of brightness; golden gleams are

flying across the wet grass, and fall softly on the lines of willows in

the valley--willows by the watercourses; the little brooks flash out

here and there between them and the fields. Turn now to the Stonehenge.

That, also, stands in great light; but it is the Gorgon light--the sword

of Chrysaor is bared against it. The cloud of judgment hangs above. The

rock pillars seem to reel before its slope, pale beneath the lightning.

And nearer, in the darkness, the shepherd lies dead, his flock

scattered.

I alluded, in speaking before of this Stonehenge, to Turner's use of the

same symbol in the drawing of Pæstum for Rogers's Italy; but a more

striking instance of its employment occurs in a Study of Pæstum, which

he engraved himself before undertaking the Liber Studiorum and another

in his drawing of the Temple of Minerva, on Cape Colonna: and observe

farther that he rarely introduces lightning, if the ruined building has

not been devoted to religion. The wrath of man may destroy the fortress,

but only the wrath of heaven can destroy the temple.

§ 21. Of these secret meanings of Turner's, we shall see enough in the

course of the inquiry we have to undertake, lastly, respecting ideas of

relation; but one more instance of his opposed use of the lightning

symbol, and of the rain of blessing, I name here, to confirm what has

been noted above. For, in this last instance, he was questioned

respecting his meaning, and explained it. I refer to the drawings of

Sinai and Lebanon, made for Finden's Bible. The sketches from which

Turner prepared that series were, I believe, careful and accurate; but

the treatment of the subjects was left wholly to him. He took the Sinai

and Lebanon to show the opposite influences of the Law and the Gospel.

The Rock of Moses is shown in the burning of the desert, among fallen

stones, forked lightning cleaving the blue mist which veils the summit

of Sinai. Armed Arabs pause at the foot of the rock. No human habitation

is seen, nor any herb or tree, nor any brook, and the lightning strikes

without rain.[12] Over the Mount Lebanon an intensely soft gray-blue sky

is melting into dewy rain. Every ravine is filled, every promontory

crowned, by tenderest foliage, golden in slanting sunshine.[13] The

white convent nestles into the hollow of the rock; and a little brook

runs under the shadow of the nearer trees, beside which two monks sit

reading.

§ 22. It was a beautiful thought, yet an erring one, as all thoughts are

which oppose the Law to the Gospel. When people read, "the law came by

Moses, but grace and truth by Christ," do they suppose that the law was

ungracious and untrue? The law was given for a foundation; the grace (or

mercy) and truth for fulfilment;--the whole forming one glorious Trinity

of judgment, mercy, and truth. And if people would but read the text of

their Bibles with heartier purpose of understanding it, instead of

superstitiously, they would see that throughout the parts which they are

intended to make most personally their own (the Psalms) it is always the

Law which is spoken of with chief joy. The Psalms respecting mercy are

often sorrowful, as in thought of what it cost; but those respecting the

law are always full of delight. David cannot contain himself for joy in

thinking of it,--he is never weary of its praise:--"How love I thy law!

it is my meditation all the day. Thy testimonies are my delight and my

counsellors; sweeter, also, than honey and the honeycomb."

§ 23. And I desire, especially, that the reader should note this, in now

closing the work through which we have passed together in the

investigation of the beauty of the visible world. For perhaps he

expected more pleasure and freedom in that work; he thought that it

would lead him at once into fields of fond imagination, and may have

been surprised to find that the following of beauty brought him always

under a sterner dominion of mysterious law; the brightness was

continually based upon obedience, and all majesty only another form of

submission. But this is indeed so. I have been perpetually hindered in

this inquiry into the sources of beauty by fear of wearying the reader

with their severities. It was always accuracy I had to ask of him, not

sympathy; patience, not zeal; apprehension, not sensation. The thing to

be shown him was not a pleasure to be snatched, but a law to be learned.

§ 24. It is in this character, however, that the beauty of the natural

world completes its message. We saw long ago, how its various _powers_

of appeal to the mind of men might be traced to some typical expression

of Divine attributes. We have seen since how its _modes_ of appeal

present constant types of human obedience to the Divine law, and

constant proofs that this law, instead of being contrary to mercy, is

the foundation of all delight, and the guide of all fair and fortunate

existence.

§ 25. Which understanding, let us receive our last message from the

Angel of the Sea.

Take up the 19th Psalm and look at it verse by verse. Perhaps to my

younger readers, one word may be permitted respecting their

Bible-reading in general.[14] The Bible is, indeed, a deep book, when

depth is required, that is to say, for deep people. But it is not

intended, particularly, for profound persons; on the contrary, much more

for shallow and simple persons. And therefore the first, and generally

the main and leading idea of the Bible, is on its surface, written in

plainest possible Greek, Hebrew, or English, needing no penetration, nor

amplification, needing nothing but what we all might give--attention.

But this, which is in every one's power, and is the only thing that God

wants, is just the last thing any one will give Him. We are delighted to

ramble away into day-dreams, to repeat pet verses from other places,

suggested by chance words; to snap at an expression which suits our own

particular views, or to dig up a meaning from under a verse, which we

should be amiably grieved to think any human being had been so happy as

to find before. But the plain, intended, immediate, fruitful meaning,

which every one ought to find always, and especially that which depends

on our seeing the relation of the verse to those near it, and getting

the force of the whole passage, in due relation--this sort of

significance we do not look for;--it being, truly, not to be discovered,

unless we really attend to what is said, instead of to our own feelings.

§ 26. It is unfortunate also, but very certain, that in order to attend

to what is said, we must go through the irksomeness of knowing the

meaning of the words. And the first thing that children should be taught

about their Bibles is, to distinguish clearly between words that they

understand and words that they do not; and to put aside the words they

do not understand, and verses connected with them, to be asked about, or

for a future time; and never to think they are reading the Bible when

they are merely repeating phrases of an unknown tongue.

§ 27. Let us try, by way of example, this 19th Psalm, and see what plain

meaning is uppermost in it.

"The heavens declare the glory of God."

What are the heavens?

The word occurring in the Lord's Prayer, and the thing expressed being

what a child may, with some advantage, be led to look at, it might be

supposed among a schoolmaster's first duties to explain this word

clearly.

Now there can be no question that in the minds of the sacred writers, it

stood naturally for the entire system of cloud, and of space beyond it,

conceived by them as a vault set with stars. But there can, also, be no

question, as we saw in previous inquiry, that the firmament, which is

said to have been "called" heaven, at the creation, expresses, in all

definite use of the word, the system of clouds, as spreading the power

of the water over the earth; hence the constant expressions dew of

heaven, rain of heaven, &c., where heaven is used in the singular; while

"the heavens," when used plurally, and especially when in distinction,

as here, from the word "firmament," remained expressive of the starry

space beyond.

§ 28. A child might therefore be told (surely, with advantage), that our

beautiful word Heaven may possibly have been formed from a Hebrew word,

meaning "the high place;" that the great warrior Roman nation, camping

much out at night, generally overtired and not in moods for thinking,

are believed, by many people, to have seen in the stars only the

likeness of the glittering studs of their armor, and to have called the

sky "The bossed, or studded;" but that others think those Roman soldiers

on their might-watches had rather been impressed by the great emptiness

and void of night, and by the far coming of sounds through its darkness,

and had called the heaven "The Hollow place." Finally, I should tell

the children, showing them first the setting of a star, how the great

Greeks had found out the truest power of the heavens, and had called

them "The Rolling." But whatever different nations had called them, at

least I would make it clear to the child's mind that in this 19th Psalm,

their whole power being intended, the two words are used which express

it: the Heavens, for the great vault or void, with all its planets, and

stars, and ceaseless march of orbs innumerable; and the Firmament, for

the ordinance of the clouds.

These heavens, then, "declare the _glory_ of God;" that is, the light of

God, the eternal glory, stable and changeless. As their orbs fail

not--but pursue their course for ever, to give light upon the earth--so

God's glory surrounds man for ever--changeless, in its fulness

insupportable--infinite.

"And the firmament showeth his _handywork_."

§ 29. The clouds, prepared by the hand of God for the help of man,

varied in their ministration--veiling the inner splendor--show, not His

eternal glory, but His daily handiwork. So He dealt with Moses. I will

cover thee "with my hand" as I pass by. Compare Job xxxvi. 24: "Remember

that thou magnify his work, which men behold. Every man may see it." Not

so the glory--that only in part; the courses of these stars are to be

seen imperfectly, and but by a few. But this firmament, "every man may

see it, man may behold it afar off." "Behold, God is great, and we know

him not. For he maketh small the drops of water: they pour down rain

according to the vapor thereof."

§ 30. "Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth

knowledge. They have no speech nor language, yet without these their

voice is heard. Their rule is gone out throughout the earth, and their

words to the end of the world."

Note that. Their rule throughout the earth, whether inhabited or

not--their law of right is thereon; but their words, spoken to human

souls, to the end of the inhabited world.

"In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun," &c. Literally, a

tabernacle, or curtained tent, with its veil and its hangings; also of

the colors of His desert tabernacle--blue, and purple, and scarlet.

Thus far the psalm describes the manner of this great heaven's message.

Thenceforward, it comes to the matter of it.

§ 31. Observe, you have the two divisions of the declaration. The

heavens (compare Psalm viii.) declare the eternal glory of God before

men, and the firmament the daily mercy of God towards men. And the

eternal glory is in this--that the law of the Lord is perfect, and His

testimony sure, and His statutes right.

And the daily mercy in this--that the commandment of the Lord is pure,

and His fear is clean, and His judgments true and righteous.

There are three oppositions:--

Between law and commandment.

Between testimony and fear.

Between statute and judgment.

§ 32. I. Between law and commandment.

The law is fixed and everlasting; uttered once, abiding for ever, as the

sun, it may not be moved. It is "perfect, converting the soul:" the

whole question about the soul being, whether it has been turned from

darkness to light, acknowledged this law or not,--whether it is godly or

ungodly? But the commandment is given momentarily to each man, according

to the need. It does not convert: it guides. It does not concern the

entire purpose of the soul; but it enlightens the eyes, respecting a

special act. The law is, "Do this always;" the commandment, "Do _thou_

this _now_:" often mysterious enough, and through the cloud; chilling,

and with strange rain of tears; yet always pure (the law converting, but

the commandment cleansing): a rod not for guiding merely, but for

strengthening, and tasting honey with. "Look how mine eyes have been

enlightened, because I tasted a little of this honey."

§ 33. II. Between testimony and fear.

The testimony is everlasting: the true promise of salvation. Bright as

the sun beyond all the earth-cloud, it makes wise the simple; all wisdom

being assured in perceiving it and trusting it; all wisdom brought to

nothing which does not perceive it.

But the fear of God is taught through special encouragement and special

withdrawal of it, according to each man's need--by the

earth-cloud--smile and frown alternately: it also, as the commandment,

is clean, purging and casting out all other fear, it only remaining for

ever.

§ 34. III. Between statute and judgment.

The statutes are the appointments of the Eternal justice; fixed and

bright, and constant as the stars; equal and balanced as their courses.

They "are right, rejoicing the heart." But the judgments are special

judgments of given acts of men. "True," that is to say, fulfilling the

warning or promise given to each man; "righteous altogether," that is,

done or executed in truth and righteousness. The statute is right, in

appointment. The judgment righteous altogether, in appointment and

fulfilment;--yet not always rejoicing the heart.

Then, respecting all these, comes the expression of passionate desire,

and of joy; that also divided with respect to each. The glory of God,

eternal in the Heavens, is future, "to be _desired_ more than gold, than

much fine gold"--treasure in the heavens that faileth not. But the

present guidance and teaching of God are on earth; they are now

possessed, sweeter than all earthly food--"sweeter than honey and the

honeycomb. Moreover by them" (the law and the testimony) "is thy servant

warned"--warned of the ways of death and life.

"And in keeping them" (the commandments and the judgments) "there is

great reward:" pain now, and bitterness of tears, but reward

unspeakable.

§ 35. Thus far the psalm has been descriptive and interpreting. It ends

in prayer.

"Who can understand his errors?" (wanderings from the perfect law.)

"Cleanse thou me from secret faults; from all that I have done against

thy will, and far from thy way, in the darkness. Keep back thy servant

from presumptuous sins" (sins against the commandment) "against thy will

when it is seen and direct, pleading with heart and conscience. So shall

I be undefiled, and innocent from the great transgression--the

transgression that crucifies afresh.

"Let the words of my mouth (for I have set them to declare thy law), and

the meditation of my heart (for I have set it to keep thy commandments),

be acceptable in thy sight, whose glory is my strength, and whose work,

my redemption; my Strength, and my Redeemer."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Compare the beautiful stanza beginning the epilogue of the

"Golden Legend."

[2] I do not mean that Correggio is greater than Turner, but that

only _his_ way of work, the touch which he has used for the golden

hair of Antiope for instance, could have painted these clouds. In

open lowland country I have never been able to come to any

satisfactory conclusion about their height, so strangely do they

blend with each other. Here, for instance, is the arrangement of an

actual group of them. The space at A was deep, purest ultramarine

blue, traversed by streaks of absolutely pure and perfect rose-color.

The blue passed downwards imperceptibly into gray at G, and then into

amber, and at the white edge below into gold. On this amber ground

the streaks P were dark purple, and, finally, the spaces at B B,

again, clearest and most precious blue, paler than that at A. The

_two_ levels of these clouds are always very notable. After a

continuance of fine weather among the Alps, the determined approach

of rain is usually announced by a soft, unbroken film of level cloud,

white and thin at the approaching edge, gray at the horizon, covering

the whole sky from side to side, and advancing steadily from the

south-west. Under its gray veil, as it approaches, are formed

detached bars, darker or lighter than the field above, according to

the position of the sun. These bars are usually of a very sharply

elongated oval shape, something like fish. I habitually call them

"fish clouds," and look upon them with much discomfort, if any

excursions of interest have been planned within the next three days.

Their oval shape is a perspective deception dependent on their

flatness; they are probably thin, extended fields, irregularly

circular.

[Illustration: FIG. 98.]

[3] I do not copy the interpolated words which follow, "and

commandeth it _not to shine_." The closing verse of the chapter, as

we have it, is unintelligible; not so in the Vulgate, the reading of

which I give.

[4] I assume the [Greek: aupnoi krênai nomades] to mean clouds, not

springs; but this does not matter, the whole passage being one of

rejoicing in moisture and dew of heaven.

[5] I believe, however, that when Pegasus strikes forth this

fountain, he is to be regarded, not as springing from Medusa's blood,

but as born of Medusa by Neptune; the true horse was given by Neptune

striking the earth with his trident; the divine horse is born to

Neptune and the storm-cloud.

[6] I have been often at great heights on the Alps in rough weather,

and have seen strong gusts of storm in the plains of the south. But,

to get full expression of the very heart and meaning of wind, there

is no place like a Yorkshire moor. I think Scottish breezes are

thinner, very bleak and piercing, but not substantial. If you lean on

them they will let you fall, but one may rest against a Yorkshire

breeze as one would on a quickset hedge. I shall not soon

forget,--having had the good fortune to meet a vigorous one on an

April morning, between Hawes and Settle, just on the flat under

Wharnside,--the vague sense of wonder with which I watched

Ingleborough stand without rocking.

[7] When there is a violent current of wind near the ground, the rain

columns slope _forward_ at the foot. See the Entrance to Fowey

Harbor, of the England Series.

[8] See Part IX. chap. 2, "The Hesperid Æglé."

[9] The reader must remember that sketches made as these are, on the

instant, cannot be far carried, and would lose all their use if they

were finished at home. These were both made in pencil, and merely

washed with gray on returning to the inn, enough to secure the main

forms.

[10] I do not say this carelessly, nor because machines throw the

laboring man "out of work." The laboring man will always have more

work than he wants. I speak thus, because the use of such machinery

involves the destruction of all pleasures in rural labor; and I doubt

not, in that destruction, the essential deterioration of the national

mind.

[11] You may see the arrangement of subject in the published

engraving, but nothing more; it is among the worst engravings in the

England Series.

[12] Hosea xiii. 5, 15.

[13] Hosea xiv. 4, 5, 6. Compare Psalm lxxii. 6-16.

[14] I believe few sermons are more false or dangerous than those in

which the teacher professes to impress his audience by showing "how

much there is in a verse." If he examined his own heart closely

before beginning, he would often find that his real desire was to

show how much he, the expounder, could make out of the verse. But

entirely honest and earnest men often fall into the same error. They

have been taught that they should always look deep, and that

Scripture is full of hidden meanings; and they easily yield to the

flattering conviction that every chance idea which comes into their

heads in looking at a word, is put there by Divine agency. Hence they

wander away into what they believe to be an inspired meditation, but

which is, in reality, a meaningless jumble of ideas; perhaps very

proper ideas, but with which the text in question has nothing

whatever to do.

PART VIII.

OF IDEAS OF RELATION:--FIRST, OF INVENTION FORMAL.

CHAPTER I.

THE LAW OF HELP.

§ 1. We have now reached the last and the most important part of our

subject. We have seen, in the first division of this book, how far art

may be, and has been, consistent with physical or material facts. In its

second division, we examined how far it may be and has been obedient to

the laws of physical beauty. In this last division we have to consider

its relations of art to God and man. Its work in the help of human

beings, and service of their Creator.

We have to inquire into the various Powers, Conditions, and Aims of mind

involved in the conception or creation of pictures; in the choice of

subject, and the mode and order of its history;--the choice of forms,

and the modes of their arrangement.

And these phases of mind being concerned, partly with choice and

arrangement of incidents, partly with choice and arrangement of forms

and colors, the whole subject will fall into two main divisions, namely,

expressional or spiritual invention; and material or formal invention.

They are of course connected;--all good formal invention being

expressional also; but as a matter of convenience it is best to say what

may be ascertained of the nature of formal invention, before attempting

to illustrate the faculty in its higher field.

§ 2. First, then, of INVENTION FORMAL, otherwise and most commonly

called technical composition; that is to say, the arrangement of lines,

forms, or colors, so as to produce the best possible effect.[1]

I have often been accused of slighting this quality in pictures; the

fact being that I have avoided it only because I considered it too great

and wonderful for me to deal with. The longer I thought, the more

wonderful it always seemed; and it is, to myself personally, the

quality, above all others, which gives me delight in pictures. Many

others I admire, or respect; but this one I rejoice in. Expression,

sentiment, truth to nature, are essential; but all these are not enough.

I never care to look at a picture again, if it be ill composed; and if

well composed I can hardly leave off looking at it.

"Well composed." Does that mean according to rule?

No. Precisely the contrary. Composed as only the man who did it could

have done it; composed as no other picture is, or was, or ever can be

again. Every great work stands alone.

§ 3. Yet there are certain elementary laws of arrangement traceable a

little way; a few of these only I shall note, not caring to pursue the

subject far in this work, so intricate it becomes even in its first

elements: nor could it be treated with any approach to completeness,

unless I were to give many and elaborate outlines of large pictures. I

have a vague hope of entering on such a task, some future day. Meantime

I shall only indicate the place which technical composition should hold

in our scheme.

And, first, let us understand what composition is, and how far it is

required.

§ 4. Composition may be best defined as the help of everything in the

picture by everything else.

I wish the reader to dwell a little on this word "Help." It is a grave

one.

In substance which we call "inanimate," as of clouds, or stones, their

atoms may cohere to each other, or consist with each other, but they do

not help each other. The removal of one part does not injure the rest.

But in a plant, the taking away of any one part does injure the rest.

Hurt or remove any portion of the sap, bark, or pith, the rest is

injured. If any part enters into a state in which it no more assists the

rest, and has thus become "helpless," we call it also "dead."

The power which causes the several portions of the plant to help each

other, we call life. Much more is this so in an animal. We may take away

the branch of a tree without much harm to it; but not the animal's limb.

Thus, intensity of life is also intensity of helpfulness--completeness

of depending of each part on all the rest. The ceasing of this help is

what we call corruption; and in proportion to the perfectness of the

help, is the dreadfulness of the loss. The more intense the life has

been, the more terrible is its corruption.

The decomposition of a crystal is not necessarily impure at all. The

fermentation of a wholesome liquid begins to admit the idea slightly;

the decay of leaves yet more; of flowers, more; of animals, with greater

painfulness and terribleness in exact proportion to their original

vitality; and the foulest of all corruption is that of the body of man;

and, in his body, that which is occasioned by disease, more than that of

natural death.

§ 5. I said just now, that though atoms of inanimate substance could not

help each other, they could "consist" with each other. "Consistence" is

their virtue. Thus the parts of a crystal are consistent, but of dust,

inconsistent. Orderly adherence, the best help its atoms can give,

constitutes the nobleness of such substance.

When matter is either consistent, or living, we call it pure, or clean;

when inconsistent, or corrupting (unhelpful), we call it impure, or

unclean. The greatest uncleanliness being that which is essentially most

opposite to life.

Life and consistency, then, both expressing one character (namely,

helpfulness, of a higher or lower order), the Maker of all creatures and

things, "by whom all creatures live, and all things consist," is

essentially and for ever the Helpful One, or in softer Saxon, the "Holy"

One.

The word has no other ultimate meaning: Helpful, harmless, undefiled:

"living" or "Lord of life."

The idea is clear and mighty in the cherubim's cry: "Helpful, helpful,

helpful, Lord God of Hosts;" _i.e._ of all the hosts, armies, and

creatures of the earth.[2]

§ 6. A pure or holy state of anything, therefore, is that in which all

its parts are helpful or consistent. They may or may not be homogeneous.

The highest or organic purities are composed of many elements in an

entirely helpful state. The highest and first law of the universe--and

the other name of life, is, therefore, "help." The other name of death

is "separation." Government and co-operation are in all things and

eternally the laws of life. Anarchy and competition, eternally, and in

all things, the laws of death.

§ 7. Perhaps the best, though the most familiar example we could take of

the nature and power of consistence, will be that of the possible

changes in the dust we tread on.

Exclusive of animal decay, we can hardly arrive at a more absolute type

of impurity than the mud or slime of a damp over-trodden path, in the

outskirts of a manufacturing town. I do not say mud of the road, because

that is mixed with animal refuse; but take merely an ounce or two of the

blackest slime of a beaten footpath on a rainy day, near a large

manufacturing town.

§ 8. That slime we shall find in most cases composed of clay (or

brickdust, which is burnt clay) mixed with soot, a little sand, and

water. All these elements are at helpless war with each other, and

destroy reciprocally each other's nature and power, competing and

fighting for place at every tread of your foot;--sand squeezing out

clay, and clay squeezing out water, and soot meddling everywhere and

defiling the whole. Let us suppose that this ounce of mud is left in

perfect rest, and that its elements gather together, like to like, so

that their atoms may get into the closest relations possible.

§ 9. Let the clay begin. Ridding itself of all foreign substance, it

gradually becomes a white earth, already very beautiful; and fit, with

help of congealing fire, to be made into finest porcelain, and painted

on, and be kept in kings' palaces. But such artificial consistence is

not its best. Leave it still quiet to follow its own instinct of unity,

and it becomes not only white, but clear; not only clear, but hard; not

only clear and hard, but so set that it can deal with light in a

wonderful way, and gather out of it the loveliest blue rays only,

refusing the rest. We call it then a sapphire.

Such being the consummation of the clay, we give similar permission of

quiet to the sand. It also becomes, first, a white earth, then proceeds

to grow clear and hard, and at last arranges itself in mysterious,

infinitely fine, parallel lines, which have the power of reflecting not

merely the blue rays, but the blue, green, purple, and red rays in the

greatest beauty in which they can be seen through any hard material

whatsoever. We call it then an opal.

In next order the soot sets to work; it cannot make itself white at

first, but instead of being discouraged, tries harder and harder, and

comes out clear at last, and the hardest thing in the world; and for the

blackness that it had, obtains in exchange the power of reflecting all

the rays of the sun at once in the vividest blaze that any solid thing

can shoot. We call it then a diamond.

Last of all the water purifies or unites itself, contented enough if it

only reach the form of a dew-drop; but if we insist on its proceeding to

a more perfect consistence, it crystallizes into the shape of a star.

And for the ounce of slime which we had by political economy of

competition, we have by political economy of co-operation, a sapphire,

an opal, and a diamond, set in the midst of a star of snow.

§ 10. Now invention in art signifies an arrangement, in which everything

in the work is thus consistent with all things else, and helpful to all

else.

It is the greatest and rarest of all the qualities of art. The power by

which it is effected is absolutely inexplicable and incommunicable; but

exercised with entire facility by those who possess it, in many cases

even unconsciously.[3]

In work which is not composed, there may be many beautiful things, but

they do not help each other. They at the best only stand beside, and

more usually compete with and destroy, each other. They may be connected

artificially in many ways, but the test of there being no invention is,

that if one of them be taken away, the others are no worse than before.

But in true composition, if one be taken away, all the rest are helpless

and valueless. Generally, in falsely composed work, if anything be taken

away, the rest will look better; because the attention is less

distracted. Hence the pleasure of inferior artists in sketching, and

their inability to finish; all that they add destroys.

§ 11. Also in true composition, everything not only helps everything

else a _little_, but helps with its utmost power. Every atom is in full

energy; and _all_ that energy is kind. Not a line, nor spark of color,

but is doing its very best, and that best is aid. The extent to which

this law is carried in truly right and noble work is wholly

inconceivable to the ordinary observer, and no true account of it would

be believed.

§ 12. True composition being entirely easy to the man who can compose,

he is seldom proud of it, though he clearly recognizes it. Also, true

composition is inexplicable. No one can explain how the notes of a

Mozart melody, or the folds of a piece of Titian's drapery, produce

their essential effect on each other. If you do not feel it, no one can

by reasoning make you feel it. And, the highest composition is so

subtle, that it is apt to become unpopular, and sometimes seem insipid.

§ 13. The reader may be surprised at my giving so high a place to

invention. But if he ever come to know true invention from false, he

will find that it is not only the highest quality of art, but is simply

the most wonderful act or power of humanity. It is pre-eminently the

deed of human creation; [Greek: poiêsis], otherwise, poetry.

If the reader will look back to my definition of poetry, he will find it

is "the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble

emotions" (Vol. III. p. 10), amplified below (§ 14) into "assembling by

help of the imagination;" that is to say, imagination associative,

described at length in Vol. II., in the chapter just referred to. The

mystery of the power is sufficiently set forth in that place. Of its

dignity I have a word or two to say here.

§ 14. Men in their several professed employments, looked at broadly, may

be properly arranged under five classes:--

1. Persons who see. These in modern language are sometimes called

sight-seers, that being an occupation coming more and more into vogue

every day. Anciently they used to be called, simply, seers.

2. Persons who talk. These, in modern language, are usually called

talkers, or speakers, as in the House of Commons, and elsewhere. They

used to be called prophets.

3. Persons who make. These, in modern language, are usually called

manufacturers. Anciently they were called poets.

4. Persons who think. There seems to be no very distinct modern title

for this kind of person, anciently called philosophers; nevertheless we

have a few of them among us.

5. Persons who do: in modern language, called practical persons;

anciently, believers.

Of the first two classes I have only this to note,--that we ought

neither to say that a person sees, if he sees falsely, nor speaks, if he

speaks falsely. For seeing falsely is worse than blindness, and speaking

falsely, than silence. A man who is too dim-sighted to discern the road

from the ditch, may feel which is which;--but if the ditch appears

manifestly to him to be the road, and the road to be the ditch, what

shall become of him? False seeing is unseeing,--on the negative side of

blindness; and false speaking, unspeaking,--on the negative side of

silence.

To the persons who think, also, the same test applies very shrewdly.

Theirs is a dangerous profession; and from the time of the Aristophanes

thought-shop to the great German establishment, or thought-manufactory,

whose productions have, unhappily, taken in part the place of the older

and more serviceable commodities of Nuremberg toys and Berlin wool, it

has been often harmful enough to mankind. It should not be so, for a

false thought is more distinctly and visibly no thought than a false

saying is no saying. But it is touching the two great productive classes

of the doers and makers, that we have one or two important points to

note here.

§ 15. Has the reader ever considered, carefully, what is the meaning of

"doing" a thing?

Suppose a rock falls from a hill-side, crushes a group of cottages, and

kills a number of people. The stone has produced a great effect in the

world. If any one asks, respecting the broken roofs, "What did it?" you

say the stone did it. Yet you don't talk of the deed of the stone. If

you inquire farther, and find that a goat had been feeding beside the

rock, and had loosened it by gnawing the roots of the grasses beneath,

you find the goat to be the active cause of the calamity, and you say

the goat did it. Yet you don't call the goat the doer, nor talk of its

evil deed. But if you find any one went up to the rock, in the night,

and with deliberate purpose loosened it, that it might fall on the

cottages, you say in quite a different sense, "It is his deed: he is the

doer of it."

§ 16. It appears, then, that deliberate purpose and resolve are needed

to constitute a deed or doing, in the true sense of the word; and that

when, accidentally or mechanically, events take place without such

purpose, we have indeed effects or results, and agents or causes, but

neither deeds nor doers.

Now it so happens, as we all well know, that by far the largest part of

things happening in practical life _are_ brought about with no

deliberate purpose. There are always a number of people who have the

nature of stones; they fall on other persons and crush them. Some again

have the nature of weeds, and twist about other people's feet and

entangle them. More have the nature of logs, and lie in the way, so that

every one falls over them. And most of all have the nature of thorns,

and set themselves by waysides, so that every passer-by must be torn,

and all good seed choked; or perhaps make wonderful crackling under

various pots, even to the extent of practically boiling water and

working pistons. All these people produce immense and sorrowful effect

in the world. Yet none of them are doers: it is their nature to crush,

impede, and prick: but deed is not in them.[4]

§ 17. And farther, observe, that even when some effect is finally

intended, you cannot call it the person's deed, unless it is _what_ he

intended.

If an ignorant person, purposing evil, accidentally does good, (as if a

thief's disturbing a family should lead them to discover in time that

their house was on fire); or _vice versâ_, if an ignorant person

intending good, accidentally does evil (as if a child should give

hemlock to his companions for celery), in neither case do you call them

the doers of what may result. So that in order to be a true deed, it is

necessary that the effect of it should be foreseen. Which, ultimately,

it cannot be, but by a person who knows, and in his deed obeys, the laws

of the universe, and of its Maker. And this knowledge is in its highest

form, respecting the will of the Ruling Spirit, called Trust. For it is

not the knowledge that a thing is, but that, according to the promise

and nature of the Ruling Spirit, a thing will be. Also obedience in its

highest form is not obedience to a constant and compulsory law, but a

persuaded or voluntary yielded obedience to an issued command; and so

far as it was a _persuaded_ submission to command, it was anciently

called, in a passive sense, "persuasion," or [Greek: pistis], and in so

far as it alone assuredly did, and it alone _could_ do, what it meant to

do, and was therefore the root and essence of all human deed, it was

called by the Latins the "doing," or _fides_, which has passed into the

French _foi_ and the English _faith_. And therefore because in His

doing always certain, and in His speaking always true, His name who

leads the armies of Heaven is "Faithful and True,"[5] and all deeds

which are done in alliance with those armies, be they small or great,

are essentially deeds of faith, which therefore, and in this one stern,

eternal, sense, subdues all kingdoms, and turns to flight the armies of

the aliens, and is at once the source and the substance of all human

deed, rightly so called.

§ 18. Thus far then of practical persons, once called believers, as set

forth in the last word of the noblest group of words ever, so far as I

know, uttered by simple man concerning his practice, being the final

testimony of the leaders of a great practical nation, whose deed

thenceforward became an example of deed to mankind:

[Greek: Ô xein', angellein Lakedaimoniois, hoti têde Keimetha, tois

keinôn rhêmasi peithomenoi.]

"O stranger! (we pray thee), tell the Lacedæmonians that we are lying

here, having _obeyed_ their words."

§ 19. What, let us ask next, is the ruling character of the person who

produces--the creator or maker, anciently called the poet?

We have seen what a deed is. What then is a "creation"? Nay, it may be

replied, to "create" cannot be said of man's labor.

On the contrary, it not only can be said, but is and must be said

continually. You certainly do not talk of creating a watch, or creating

a shoe; nevertheless you _do_ talk of creating a feeling. Why is this?

Look back to the greatest of all creation, that of the world. Suppose

the trees had been ever so well or so ingeniously put together, stem and

leaf, yet if they had not been able to grow, would they have been well

created? Or suppose the fish had been cut and stitched finely out of

skin and whalebone; yet, cast upon the waters, had not been able to

swim? Or suppose Adam and Eve had been made in the softest clay, ever so

neatly, and set at the foot of the tree of knowledge, fastened up to

it, quite unable to fall, or do anything else, would they have been well

created, or in any true sense created at all?

§ 20. It will, perhaps, appear to you, after a little farther thought,

that to create anything in reality is to put life into it.

A poet, or creator, is therefore a person who puts things together, not

as a watchmaker steel, or a shoemaker leather, but who puts life into

them.

His work is essentially this: it is the gathering and arranging of

material by imagination, so as to have in it at last the harmony or

helpfulness of life, and the passion or emotion of life. Mere fitting

and adjustment of material is nothing; that is watchmaking. But helpful

and passionate harmony, essentially choral harmony, so called from the

Greek word "rejoicing,"[6] is the harmony of Apollo and the Muses; the

word Muse and Mother being derived from the same root, meaning

"passionate seeking," or love, of which the issue is passionate finding,

or sacred INVENTION. For which reason I could not bear to use any baser

word than this of invention. And if the reader will think over all these

things, and follow them out, as I think he may easily with this much of

clue given him, he will not any more think it wrong in me to place

invention so high among the powers of man.[7]

Or any more think it strange that the last act of the life of

Socrates[8] should have been to purify himself from the sin of having

negligently listened to the voice within him, which, through all his

past life, had bid him "labor, and make harmony."

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The word composition has been so much abused, and is in itself so

inexpressive, that when I wrote the first part of this work I

intended always to use, in this final section of it, the word

"invention," and to reserve the term "composition" for that false

composition which can be taught on principles; as I have already so

employed the term in the chapter on "Imagination Associative," in the

second volume. But, in arranging this section, I find it is not

conveniently possible to avoid the ordinary modes of parlance; I

therefore only head the section as I intended (and as is, indeed,

best), using in the text the ordinarily accepted term; only, the

reader must be careful to note that what I spoke of shortly as

"composition" in the chapters on "Imagination," I here always call,

distinctly, "false composition;" using here, as I find most

convenient, the words "invention" or "composition" indifferently for

the true faculty.

[2] "The cries of them which have reaped have entered into the ears

of the Lord of Sabaoth (of all the creatures of the earth)." You will

find a wonderful clearness come into many texts by reading,

habitually, "helpful" and "helpfulness" for "holy" and "holiness," or

else "living," as in Rom. xi. 16. The sense "dedicated" (the Latin

_sanctus_), being, of course, inapplicable to the Supreme Being, is

an entirely secondary and accidental one.

[3] By diligent study of good compositions it is possible to put work

together so that the parts shall help each other, a little, or at all

events do no harm; and when some tact and taste are associated with

this diligence, semblances of real invention are often produced,

which, being the results of great labor, the artist is always proud

of; and which, being capable of learned explanation and imitation,

the spectator naturally takes interest in. The common precepts about

composition all produce and teach this false kind, which, as true

composition is the noblest, being the corruption of it, is the

ignoblest condition of art.

[4] We may, perhaps, expediently recollect as much of our botany as

to teach us that there may be sharp and rough persons, like spines,

who yet have good in them, and are essentially branches, and can bud.

But the true thorny person is no spine, only an excrescence; rootless

evermore,--leafless evermore. No crown made of such can ever meet

glory of Angel's hand. (In Memoriam, lxviii.)

[5] "True," means, etymologically, not "consistent with fact," but

"which may be trusted." "This is a true saying, and worthy of all

acceptation," &c., meaning a trusty saying,--a saying to be rested

on, leant upon.

[6] [Greek: Chorous te ônomakenai para tês charas emphyton onoma].

(Dé leg. II. 1.)

[7] This being, indeed, among the visiblest signs of the Divine or

immortal life. We have got a base habit of opposing the word "mortal"

or "deathful" merely to "_im_-mortal;" whereas it is essentially

contrary to "divine" (to [Greek: theios], not to [Greek: athanatos],

Phaedo, 66), that which is deathful being anarchic or disobedient,

and that which is divine ruling and obedient; this being the true

distinction between flesh and spirit.

[8] [Greek: Pollakis moi phoitôn to auto enypnion en tô parelthonti

biô, allot' en allê opsei phainomenon, ta auta de legon, Ô Sôkra tes,

ephê, mousikên poiei kai ergazou]. (Phaedo, 11.)

CHAPTER II.

THE TASK OF THE LEAST.

§ 1. The reader has probably been surprised at my assertions made often

before now, and reiterated here, that the _minutest_ portion of a great

composition is helpful to the whole. It certainly does not seem easily

conceivable that this should be so. I will go farther, and say that it

is inconceivable. But it is the fact.

We shall discern it to be so by taking one or two compositions to

pieces, and examining the fragments. In doing which, we must remember

that a great composition always has a leading emotional purpose,

technically called its motive, to which all its lines and forms have

some relation. Undulating lines, for instance, are expressive of action;

and would be false in effect if the motive of the picture was one of

repose. Horizontal and angular lines are expressive of rest and

strength; and would destroy a design whose purpose was to express

disquiet and feebleness. It is therefore necessary to ascertain the

motive before descending to the detail.

§ 2. One of the simplest subjects, in the series of the Rivers of

France, is "Rietz, near Saumur." The published Plate gives a better

rendering than usual of its tone of light; and my rough etching, Plate

73, sufficiently shows the arrangement of its lines. What is their

motive?

To get at it completely, we must know something of the Loire.

The district through which it here flows is, for the most part, a low

place, yet not altogether at the level of the stream, but cut into steep

banks of chalk or gravel, thirty or forty feet high, running for miles

at about an equal height above the water.

[Illustration: 73. Loire-side.]

These banks are excavated by the peasantry, partly for houses, partly

for cellars, so economizing vineyard space above; and thus a kind of

continuous village runs along the river-side, composed half of caves,

half of rude buildings, backed by the cliff, propped against it,

therefore always leaning away from the river; mingled with overlappings

of vineyard trellis from above, and little towers or summer-houses for

outlook, when the grapes are ripe, or for gossip over the garden wall.

§ 3. It is an autumnal evening, then, by this Loire side. The day has

been hot, and the air is heavy and misty still; the sunlight warm, but

dim; the brown vine-leaves motionless: all else quiet. Not a sail in

sight on the river,[1] its strong, noiseless current lengthening the

stream of low sunlight.

The motive of the picture, therefore, is the expression of rude but

perfect peace, slightly mingled with an indolent languor and

despondency; the peace between intervals of enforced labor; happy, but

listless, and having little care or hope about the future; cutting its

home out of this gravel bank, and letting the vine and the river twine

and undermine as they will; careless to mend or build, so long as the

walls hold together, and the black fruit swells in the sunshine.

§ 4. To get this repose, together with rude stability, we have therefore

horizontal lines and bold angles. The grand horizontal space and sweep

of Turner's distant river show perhaps better in the etching than in the

Plate; but depend wholly for value on the piece of near wall. It is the

vertical line of its dark side which drives the eye up into the

distance, right against the horizontal, and so makes it felt, while the

flatness of the stone prepares the eye to understand the flatness of the

river. Farther: hide with your finger the little ring on that stone, and

you will find the river has stopped flowing. That ring is to repeat the

curved lines of the river bank, which express its line of current, and

to bring the feeling of them down near us. On the other side of the road

the horizontal lines are taken up again by the dark pieces of wood,

without which we should still lose half our space.

Next: The repose is to be not only perfect, but indolent: the repose of

out-wearied people: not caring much what becomes of them.

You see the road is covered with litter. Even the crockery is left

outside the cottage to dry in the sun, after being washed up. The steps

of the cottage door have been too high for comfort originally, only it

was less trouble to cut three large stones than four or five small. They

are now all aslope and broken, not repaired for years. Their weighty

forms increase the sense of languor throughout the scene, and of

stability also, because we feel how difficult it would be to stir them.

The crockery has its work to do also;--the arched door on the left being

necessary to show the great thickness of walls and the strength they

require to prevent falling in of the cliff above;--as the horizontal

lines must be diffused on the right, so this arch must be diffused on

the left; and the large round plate on one side of the steps, with the

two small ones on the other, are to carry down the element of circular

curvature. Hide them, and see the result.

As they carry the arched group of forms down, the arched window-shutter

diffuses it upwards, where all the lines of the distant buildings

suggest one and the same idea of disorderly and careless strength,

mingling masonry with rock.

§ 5. So far of the horizontal and curved lines. How of the radiating

ones? What has the black vine trellis got to do?

Lay a pencil or ruler parallel with its lines. You will find that they

point to the massive building in the distance. To which, as nearly as is

possible without at once showing the artifice, every other radiating

line points also; almost ludicrously when it is once pointed out; even

the curved line of the top of the terrace runs into it, and the last

sweep of the river evidently leads to its base. And so nearly is it in

the exact centre of the picture, that one diagonal from corner to corner

passes through it, and the other only misses the base by the twentieth

of an inch.

If you are accustomed to France, you will know in a moment by its

outline that this massive building is an old church.

Without it, the repose would not have been essentially the laborer's

rest--rest as of the Sabbath. Among all the groups of lines that point

to it, two are principal: the first, those of the vine trellis: the

second, those of the handles of the saw left in the beam:--the blessing

of human life and its labor.

Whenever Turner wishes to express profound repose, he puts in the

foreground some instrument of labor cast aside. See, in Roger's Poems,

the last vignette, "Datur hora quieti," with the plough in the furrow;

and in the first vignette of the same book, the scythe on the shoulder

of the peasant going home. (There is nothing about the scythe in the

passage of the poem which this vignette illustrates.)

§ 6. Observe, farther, the outline of the church itself. As our

habitations are, so is our church, evidently a heap of old, but massive,

walls, patched, and repaired, and roofed in, and over and over, until

its original shape is hardly recognizable. I know the kind of church

well--can tell even here, two miles off, that I shall find some Norman

arches in the apse, and a flamboyant porch, rich and dark, with every

statue broken out of it; and a rude wooden belfry above all; and a

quantity of miserable shops built in among the buttresses; and that I

may walk in and out as much as I please, but that how often soever, I

shall always find some one praying at the Holy Sepulchre, in the darkest

aisle, and my going in and out will not disturb them. For they _are_

praying, which in many a handsomer and highlier-furbished edifice might,

perhaps, not be so assuredly the case.

§ 7. Lastly: What kind of people have we on this winding road? Three

indolent ones, leaning on the wall to look over into the gliding water;

and a matron with her market panniers, by her figure, not a fast rider.

The road, besides, is bad, and seems unsafe for trotting, and she has

passed without disturbing the cat, who sits comfortably on the block of

wood in the middle of it.

§ 8. Next to this piece of quietness, let us glance at a composition in

which the motive is one of tumult: that of the Fall of Schaffhausen. It

is engraved in the Keepsake. I have etched in Plate 74, at the top, the

chief lines of its composition,[2] in which the first great purpose is

to give swing enough to the water. The line of fall is straight and

monotonous in reality. Turner wants to get the great concave sweep and

rush of the river well felt, in spite of the unbroken form. The column

of spray, rocks, mills, and bank, all radiate like a plume, sweeping

round together in grand curves to the left, where the group of figures,

hurried about the ferry boat, rises like a dash of spray; they also

radiating: so as to form one perfectly connected cluster, with the two

gens-d'armes and the millstones; the millstones at the bottom being the

root of it; the two soldiers laid right and left to sustain the branch

of figures beyond, balanced just as a tree bough would be.

§ 9. One of the gens-d'armes is flirting with a young lady in a round

cap and full sleeves, under pretence of wanting her to show him what she

has in her bandbox. The motive of which flirtation is, so far as Turner

is concerned in it, primarily the bandbox: this and the millstones

below, give him a series of concave lines, which, concentrated by the

recumbent soldiers, intensify the hollow sweep of the fall, precisely as

the ring on the stone does the Loire eddies. These curves are carried

out on the right by the small plate of eggs, laid to be washed at the

spring; and, all these concave lines being a little too quiet and

recumbent, the staggering casks are set on the left, and the

ill-balanced milk-pail on the right, to give a general feeling of things

being rolled over and over. The things which are to give this sense of

rolling are dark, in order to hint at the way in which the cataract

rolls boulders of rock; while the forms which are to give the sense of

its sweeping force are white. The little spring, splashing out of its

pine-trough, is to give contrast with the power of the fall,--while it

carries out the general sense of splashing water.

[Illustration: 74. The Mill-stream.]

[Illustration: Painted by J. N. W. Turner. Drawn by J. Ruskin. Engraved

by R. P. Cuff.

75. The Castle of Lauffen.]

§ 10. This spring exists on the spot, and so does everything else in the

picture; but the combinations are wholly arbitrary; it being Turner's

fixed principle to collect out of any scene whatever was characteristic,

and put it together just as he liked. The changes made in this instance

are highly curious. The mills have no resemblance whatever to the real

group as seen from this spot; for there is a vulgar and formal

dwelling-house in front of them. But if you climb the rock behind them,

you find they form on that side a towering cluster, which Turner has put

with little modification into the drawing. What he has done to the

mills, he has done with still greater audacity to the central rock. Seen

from this spot, it shows, in reality, its greatest breadth, and is heavy

and uninteresting; but on the Lauffen side, exposes its consumed base,

worn away by the rush of water, which Turner resolving to show, serenely

draws the rock as it appears from the other side of the Rhine, and

brings that view of it over to this side. I have etched the bit with the

rock a little larger below; and if the reader knows the spot, he will

see that this piece of the drawing, reversed in the etching, is almost a

bonâ fide unreversed study of the fall from the Lauffen side.[3]

Finally, the castle of Lauffen itself, being, when seen from this spot,

too much foreshortened to show its extent, Turner walks a quarter of a

mile lower down the river, draws the castle accurately there, brings it

back with him, and puts it in all its extent, where he chooses to have

it, beyond the rocks.

I tried to copy and engrave this piece of the drawing of its real size,

merely to show the forms of the trees, drifted back by the breeze from

the fall, and wet with its spray; but in the endeavor to facsimile the

touches, great part of their grace and ease has been lost; still, Plate

75 may, if compared with the same piece in the Keepsake engraving, at

least show that the original drawing has not yet been rendered with

completeness.

§ 11. These two examples may sufficiently serve to show the mode in

which minor details, both in form and spirit, are used by Turner to aid

his main motives; of course I cannot, in the space of this volume, go on

examining subjects at this length, even if I had time to etch them; but

every design of Turner's would be equally instructive, examined in a

similar manner. Thus far, however, we have only seen the help of the

parts to the whole: we must give yet a little attention to the mode of

combining the smallest details.

I am always led away, in spite of myself, from my proper subject here,

invention formal, or the merely pleasant placing of lines and masses,

into the emotional results of such arrangement.

The chief reason of this is that the emotional power can be explained;

but the perfection of formative arrangement, as I said, cannot be

explained, any more than that of melody in music. An instance or two of

it, however, may be given.

§ 12. Much fine formative arrangement depends on a more or less

elliptical or pear-shaped balance of the group, obtained by arranging

the principal members of it on two opposite curves, and either

centralizing it by some powerful feature at the base, centre, or summit;

or else clasping it together by some conspicuous point or knot. A very

small object will often do this satisfactorily.

If you can get the complete series of Lefèbre's engravings from Titian

and Veronese, they will be quite enough to teach you, in their dumb way,

everything that is teachable of composition; at all events, try to get

the Madonna, with St. Peter and St. George under the two great pillars;

the Madonna and Child, with mitred bishop on her left, and St. Andrew on

her right; and Veronese's Triumph of Venice. The first of these Plates

unites two formative symmetries; that of the two pillars, clasped by the

square altar-cloth below and cloud above, catches the eye first; but the

main group is the fivefold one rising to the left, crowned by the

Madonna. St. Francis and St. Peter form its two wings, and the kneeling

portrait figures, its base. It is clasped at the bottom by the key of

St. Peter, which points straight at the Madonna's head, and is laid on

the steps solely for this purpose; the curved lines, which enclose the

group, meet also in her face; and the straight line of light, on the

cloak of the nearest senator, points at her also. If you have Turner's

Liber Studiorum, turn to the Lauffenburg, and compare the figure group

there: a fivefold chain, one standing figure, central; two recumbent,

for wings; two half-recumbent, for bases; and a cluster of weeds to

clasp. Then turn to Lefèbre's Europa (there are two in the series--I

mean the one with the two tree trunks over her head). It is a wonderful

ninefold group. Europa central; two stooping figures, each surmounted by

a standing one, for wings; a cupid on one side, and dog on the other,

for bases; a cupid and trunk of tree, on each side, to terminate above;

and a garland for clasp.

[Illustration: FIG. 94.]

§ 13. Fig. 94, page 171, will serve to show the mode in which similar

arrangements are carried into the smallest detail. It is magnified four

times from a cluster of leaves in the foreground of the "Isis" (Liber

Studiorum). Figs. 95 and 96, page 172, show the arrangement of the two

groups composing it; the lower is purely symmetrical, with trefoiled

centre and broad masses for wings; the uppermost is a sweeping

continuous curve, symmetrical, but foreshortened. Both are clasped by

arrow-shaped leaves. The two whole groups themselves are, in turn,

members of another larger group, composing the entire foreground, and

consisting of broad dock-leaves, with minor clusters on the right and

left, of which these form the chief portion on the right side.

[Illustration: FIG. 95.]

[Illustration: FIG. 96.]

§ 14. Unless every leaf, and every visible point or object, however

small, forms a part of some harmony of this kind (these symmetrical

conditions being only the most simple and obvious), it has no business

in the picture. It is the necessary connection of all the forms and

colors, down to the last touch, which constitutes great or inventive

work, separated from all common work by an impassable gulf.

By diligently copying the etchings of the Liber Studiorum, the reader

may, however, easily attain the perception of the existence of these

relations, and be prepared to understand Turner's more elaborate

composition. It would take many figures to disentangle and explain the

arrangements merely of the leaf cluster, Fig. 78, facing page 97; but

that there _is_ a system, and that every leaf has a fixed value and

place in it, can hardly but be felt at a glance.

It is curious that, in spite of all the constant talkings of

"composition" which goes on among art students, true composition is just

the last thing which appears to be perceived. One would have thought

that in this group, at least, the value of the central black leaf would

have been seen, of which the principal function is to point towards, and

continue, the line of bank above. See Plate 62. But a glance at the

published Plate in the England series will show that no idea of the

composition had occurred to the engraver's mind. He thought any leaves

would do, and supplied them from his own repertory of hack vegetation.

§ 15. I would willingly enlarge farther on this subject--it is a

favorite one with me; but the figures required for any exhaustive

treatment of it would form a separate volume. All that I can do is to

indicate, as these examples do sufficiently, the vast field open to the

student's analysis if he cares to pursue the subject; and to mark for

the general reader these two strong conclusions:--that nothing in great

work is ever either fortuitous or contentious.

It is not fortuitous; that is to say, not left to fortune. The "must do

it by a kind of felicity" of Bacon is true; it is true also that an

accident is often suggestive to an inventor. Turner himself said, "I

never lose an accident." But it is this not _losing_ it, this taking

things out of the hands of Fortune, and putting them into those of force

and foresight, which attest the master. Chance may sometimes help, and

sometimes provoke, a success; but must never rule, and rarely allure.

And, lastly, nothing must be contentious. Art has many uses and many

pleasantnesses; but of all its services, none are higher than its

setting forth, by a visible and enduring image, the nature of all true

authority and freedom; Authority which defines and directs the action of

benevolent law; and Freedom which consists in deep and soft consent of

individual[4] helpfulness.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The sails in the engraving were put in to catch the public eye.

There are none in the drawing.

[2] These etchings of compositions are all reversed, for they are

merely sketches on the steel, and I cannot sketch easily except

straight from the drawing, and without reversing. The looking-glass

plagues me with cross lights. As examples of composition, it does not

the least matter which way they are turned; and the reader may see

this Schaffhausen subject from the right side of the Rhine, by

holding the book before a glass. The rude indications of the figures

in the Loire subject are nearly facsimiles of Turner's.

[3] With the exception of the jagged ledge rising out of the foam

below which comes from the north side, and is admirable in its

expression of the position of the limestone-beds, which, rising from

below the drift gravel of Constance, are the real cause of the fall

of Schaffhausen.

[4] "Individual," that is to say, distinct and separate in character,

though joined in purpose. I might have enlarged on this head, but

that all I should care to say has been already said admirably by Mr.

J. S. Mill in his essay on _Liberty_.

CHAPTER III.

THE RULE OF THE GREATEST.

§ 1. In the entire range of art principles, none perhaps present a

difficulty so great to the student, or require from the teacher

expression so cautious, and yet so strong, as those which concern the

nature and influence of magnitude.

In one sense, and that deep, there is no such thing as magnitude. The

least thing is as the greatest, and one day as a thousand years, in the

eyes of the Maker of great and small things. In another sense, and that

close to us and necessary, there exist both magnitude and value. Though

not a sparrow falls to the ground unnoted, there are yet creatures who

are of more value than many; and the same Spirit which weighs the dust

of the earth in a balance, counts the isles as a little thing.

§ 2. The just temper of human mind in this matter may, nevertheless, be

told shortly. Greatness can only be rightly estimated when minuteness is

justly reverenced. Greatness is the aggregation of minuteness; nor can

its sublimity be felt truthfully by any mind unaccustomed to the

affectionate watching of what is least.

But if this affection for the least be unaccompanied by the powers of

comparison and reflection; if it be intemperate in its thirst, restless

in curiosity, and incapable of the patient and self-commandant pause

which is wise to arrange, and submissive to refuse, it will close the

paths of noble art to the student as effectually, and hopelessly, as

even the blindness of pride, or impatience of ambition.

§ 3. I say the paths of noble art, not of useful art. All accurate

investigation will have its reward; the morbid curiosity will at least

slake the thirst of others, if not its own; and the diffused and petty

affections will distribute, in serviceable measure, their minute

delights and narrow discoveries. The opposite error, the desire of

greatness as such, or rather of what appears great to indolence and

vanity;--the instinct which I have described in the "Seven Lamps,"

noting it, among the Renaissance builders, to be an especial and

unfailing sign of baseness of mind, is as fruitless as it is vile; no

way profitable--every way harmful: the widest and most corrupting

expression of vulgarity. The microscopic drawing of an insect may be

precious; but nothing except disgrace and misguidance will ever be

gathered from such work as that of Haydon or Barry.

§ 4. The work I have mostly had to do, since this essay was begun, has

been that of contention against such debased issues of swollen insolence

and windy conceit; but I have noticed lately, that some lightly-budding

philosophers have depreciated true greatness; confusing the relations of

scale, as they bear upon human instinct and morality; reasoning as if a

mountain were no nobler than a grain of sand, or as if many souls were

not of mightier interest than one. To whom it must be shortly answered

that the Lord of power and life knew which were His noblest works, when

He bade His servant watch the play of the Leviathan, rather than dissect

the spawn of the minnow; and that when it comes to practical question

whether a single soul is to be jeoparded for many, and this Leonidas, or

Curtius, or Winkelried shall abolish--so far as abolishable--his own

spirit, that he may save more numerous spirits, such question is to be

solved by the simple human instinct respecting number and magnitude, not

by reasonings on infinity:--

"Le navigateur, qui, la nuit, voit l'océan étinceler de lumière,

danser en guirlandes de feu, s'égaye d'abord de ce spectacle. Il fait

dix lieues; la guirlande s'allonge indéfiniment, elle s'agite, se

tord, se noue, aux mouvements de la lame; c'est un serpent monstrueux

qui va toujours s'allongeant, jusqu'à trente lieues, quarante lieues.

Et tout cela n'est qu'une danse d'animalcules imperceptibles. En quel

nombre? A cette question l'imagination s'effraye; elle sent là une

nature de puissance immense, de richesse epouvantable.... Que sont ces

petits des petits? Rien moins que les constructeurs du globe où nous

sommes. De leurs corps, de leurs débris, ils ont préparé le sol qui

est sous nos pas.... Et ce sont les plus petits qui ont fait les plus

grandes choses. L'imperceptible rhizopode s'est bâti un monument bien

autre que les pyramides, pas moins que l'Italie centrale, une notable

partie de la chaîne des Apennins. Mais c'était trop peu encore; les

masses énormes du Chili, les prodigieuses Cordillères, qui regardent

le monde à leurs pieds, sont le monument funéraire où cet être

insaisissable, et pour ainsi dire, invisible, a enseveli les débris de

son espèce dïsparue."--(Michelet: _L'Insecte_.)

§ 5. In these passages, and those connected with them in the chapter

from which they are taken, itself so vast in scope, and therefore so

sublime, we may perhaps find the true relations of minuteness,

multitude, and magnitude. We shall not feel that there is no such thing

as littleness, or no such thing as magnitude. Nor shall we be disposed

to confuse a Volvox with the Cordilleras; but we may learn that they

both are bound together by links of eternal life and toil; we shall see

the vastest thing noble, chiefly for what it includes; and the meanest

for what it accomplishes. Thence we might gather--and the conclusion

will be found in experience true--that the sense of largeness would be

most grateful to minds capable of comprehending, balancing, and

comparing; but capable also of great patience and expectation; while the

sense of minute wonderfulness would be attractive to minds acted upon by

sharp, small, penetrative sympathies, and apt to be impatient,

irregular, and partial. This fact is curiously shown in the relations

between the temper of the great composers and the modern pathetic

school. I was surprised at the first rise of that school, now some years

ago, by observing how they restrained themselves to subjects which in

other hands would have been wholly uninteresting (compare Vol. IV., p.

19); and in their succeeding efforts, I saw with increasing wonder, that

they were almost destitute of the power of feeling vastness, or enjoying

the forms which expressed it. A mountain or great building only appeared

to them as a piece of color of a certain shape. The powers it

represented, or included, were invisible to them. In general they

avoided subjects expressing space or mass, and fastened on confined,

broken, and sharp forms; liking furze, fern, reeds, straw, stubble, dead

leaves, and such like, better than strong stones, broad-flowing leaves,

or rounded hills: in all such greater things, when forced to paint them,

they missed the main and mighty lines; and this no less in what they

loved than in what they disliked; for though fond of foliage, their

trees always had a tendency to congeal into little acicular

thorn-hedges, and never tossed free. Which modes of choice proceed

naturally from a petulant sympathy with local and immediately visible

interests or sorrows, not regarding their large consequences, nor

capable of understanding more massive view or more deeply deliberate

mercifulness;--but peevish and horror-struck, and often incapable of

self-control, though not of self-sacrifice. There are more people who

can forget themselves than govern themselves.

This narrowly pungent and bitter virtue has, however, its beautiful

uses, and is of special value in the present day, when surface-work,

shallow generalization, and cold arithmetical estimates of things, are

among the chief dangers and causes of misery which men have to deal

with.

§ 6. On the other hand, and in clear distinction from all such workers,

it is to be remembered that the great composers, not less deep in

feeling, are in the fixed habit of regarding as much the relations and

positions, as the separate nature, of things; that they reap and thrash

in the sheaf, never pluck ears to rub in the hand; fish with net, not

line, and sweep their prey together within great cords of errorless

curve;--that nothing ever bears to them a separate or isolated aspect,

but leads or links a chain of aspects--that to them it is not merely the

surface, nor the substance, of anything that is of import; but its

circumference and continence: that they are pre-eminently patient and

reserved; observant, not curious;--comprehensive, not conjectural; calm

exceedingly; unerring, constant, terrible in steadfastness of intent;

unconquerable: incomprehensible: always suggesting, implying, including,

more than can be told.

§ 7. And this may be seen down to their treatment of the smallest

things.

For there is nothing so small but we may, as we choose, see it in the

whole, or in part, and in subdued connection with other things, or in

individual and petty prominence. The greatest treatment is always that

which gives conception the widest range, and most harmonious

guidance;--it being permitted us to employ a certain quantity of time,

and certain number of touches of pencil--he who with these embraces the

largest sphere of thought, and suggests within that sphere the most

perfect order of thought, has wrought the most wisely, and therefore

most nobly.

§ 8. I do not, however, purpose here to examine or illustrate the

nature of great treatment--to do so effectually would need many examples

from the figure composers; and it will be better (if I have time to work

out the subject carefully) that I should do so in a form which may be

easily accessible to young students. Here I will only state in

conclusion what it is chiefly important for all students to be convinced

of, that all the technical qualities by which greatness of treatment is

known, such as reserve in color, tranquillity and largeness of line, and

refusal of unnecessary objects of interest, are, when they are real, the

exponents of an habitually noble temper of mind, never the observances

of a precept supposed to be useful. The refusal or reserve of a mighty

painter cannot be imitated; it is only by reaching the same intellectual

strength that you will be able to give an equal dignity to your

self-denial. No one can tell you beforehand what to accept, or what to

ignore; only remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater

your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your

words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life, the secret

of high success will be found, not in a fretful, and various excellence,

but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim.

CHAPTER IV.

THE LAW OF PERFECTNESS.

§1. Among the several characteristics of great treatment which in the

last chapter were alluded to without being enlarged upon, one will be

found several times named;--reserve.

It is necessary for our present purpose that we should understand this

quality more distinctly. I mean by it the power which a great painter

exercises over himself in fixing certain limits, either of force, of

color, or of quantity of work;--limits which he will not transgress in

any part of his picture, even though here and there a painful sense of

incompletion may exist, under the fixed conditions, and might tempt an

inferior workman to infringe them. The nature of this reserve we must

understand in order that we may also determine the nature of true

completion or perfectness, which is the end of composition.

§ 2. For perfectness, properly so called, means harmony. The word

signifies, literally, the doing our work _thoroughly_. It does not mean

carrying it up to any constant and established degree of finish, but

carrying the whole of it up to a degree determined upon. In a chalk or

pencil sketch by a great master, it will often be found that the deepest

shades are feeble tints of pale gray; the outlines nearly invisible, and

the forms brought out by a ghostly delicacy of touch, which, on looking

close to the paper, will be indistinguishable from its general texture.

A single line of ink, occurring anywhere in such a drawing, would of

course destroy it; placed in the darkness of a mouth or nostril, it

would turn the expression into a caricature; on a cheek or brow it would

be simply a blot. Yet let the blot remain, and let the master work up to

it with lines of similar force; and the drawing which was before

perfect, in terms of pencil, will become, under his hand, perfect in

terms of ink; and what was before a scratch on the cheek will become a

necessary and beautiful part of its gradation.

All great work is thus reduced under certain conditions, and its right

to be called complete depends on its fulfilment of them, not on the

nature of the conditions chosen. Habitually, indeed, we call a colored

work which is satisfactory to us, finished, and a chalk drawing

unfinished; but in the mind of the master, all his work is, according to

the sense in which you use the word, equally perfect or imperfect.

Perfect, if you regard its purpose and limitation; imperfect, if you

compare it with the natural standard. In what appears to you consummate,

the master has assigned to himself terms of shortcoming, and marked with

a sad severity the point up to which he will permit himself to contend

with nature. Were it not for his acceptance of such restraint, he could

neither quit his work, nor endure it. He could not quit it, for he would

always perceive more that might be done; he could not endure it, because

all doing ended only in more elaborate deficiency.

§ 3. But we are apt to forget, in modern days, that the reserve of a man

who is not putting forth half his strength is different in manner and

dignity from the effort of one who can do no more. Charmed, and justly

charmed, by the harmonious sketches of great painters, and by the

grandeur of their acquiescence in the point of pause, we have put

ourselves to produce sketches as an end instead of a means, and thought

to imitate the painter's scornful restraint of his own power, by a

scornful rejection of the things beyond ours. For many reasons,

therefore, it becomes desirable to understand precisely and finally what

a good painter means by completion.

§ 4. The sketches of true painters may be classed under the following

heads:--

I. _Experimental._--In which they are assisting an imperfect conception

of a subject by trying the look of it on paper in different ways.

By the greatest men this kind of sketch is hardly ever made; they

conceive their subjects distinctly at once, and their sketch is not to

try them, but to fasten them down. Raphael's form the only important

exception--and the numerous examples of experimental work by him are

evidence of his composition being technical rather than imaginative. I

have never seen a drawing of the kind by any great Venetian. Among the

nineteen thousand sketches by Turner--which I arranged in the National

Gallery--there was, to the best of my recollection, _not one_. In

several instances the work, after being carried forward a certain

length, had been abandoned and begun again with another view; sometimes

also two or more modes of treatment had been set side by side with a

view to choice. But there were always two distinct imaginations

contending for realization--not experimental modifications of one.

§ 5. II. _Determinant._--The fastening down of an idea in the simplest

terms, in order that it may not be disturbed or confused by after work.

Nearly all the great composers do this, methodically, before beginning a

painting. Such sketches are usually in a high degree resolute and

compressive; the best of them outlined or marked calmly with the pen,

and deliberately washed with color, indicating the places of the

principal lights.

Fine drawings of this class never show any hurry or confusion. They are

the expression of concluded operations of mind, are drawn slowly, and

are not so much sketches, as maps.

§ 6. III. _Commemorative._--Containing records of facts which the master

required. These in their most elaborate form are "studies," or drawings,

from Nature, of parts needed in the composition, often highly finished

in the part which is to be introduced. In this form, however, they never

occur by the greatest imaginative masters. For by a truly great inventor

everything is invented; no atom of the work is unmodified by his mind;

and no study from nature, however beautiful, could be introduced by him

into his design without change; it would not fit with the rest. Finished

studies for introduction are therefore chiefly by Leonardo and Raphael,

both technical designers rather than imaginative ones.

Commemorative sketches, by great masters, are generally hasty, merely to

put them in mind of motives of invention, or they are shorthand

memoranda of things with which they do not care to trouble their memory;

or, finally, accurate notes of things which they must _not_ modify by

invention, as local detail, costume, and such like. You may find

perfectly accurate drawings of coats of arms, portions of dresses,

pieces of architecture, and so on, by all the great men; but you will

not find elaborate studies of bits of their pictures.

[Illustration: FIG. 97.]

§ 7. When the sketch is made merely as a memorandum, it is impossible to

say how little, or what kind of drawing, may be sufficient for the

purpose. It is of course likely to be hasty from its very nature, and

unless the exact purpose be understood, it may be as unintelligible as a

piece of shorthand writing. For instance, in the corner of a sheet of

sketches made at sea, among those of Turner, at the National Gallery,

occurs this one, Fig. 97. I suppose most persons would not see much use

in it. It nevertheless was probably one of the most important sketches

made in Turner's life, fixing for ever in his mind certain facts

respecting the sunrise from a clear sea-horizon. Having myself watched

such sunrise, occasionally, I perceive this sketch to mean as follows:--

(Half circle at the top.) When the sun was only half out of the sea, the

horizon was sharply traced across its disk, and red streaks of vapor

crossed the lower part of it.

(Horseshoe underneath.) When the sun had risen so far as to show

three-quarters of its diameter, its light became so great as to conceal

the sea-horizon, consuming it away in descending rays.

(Smaller horseshoe below.) When on the point of detaching itself from

the horizon, the sun still consumed away the line of the sea, and looked

as if pulled down by it.

(Broken oval.) Having risen about a fourth of its diameter above the

horizon, the sea-line reappeared; but the risen orb was flattened by

refraction into an oval.

(Broken circle.) Having risen a little farther above the sea-line, the

sun, at last, got itself round, and all right, with sparkling reflection

on the waves just below the sea-line.

This memorandum is for its purpose entirely perfect and efficient,

though the sun is not drawn carefully round, but with a dash of the

pencil; but there is no affected or desired slightness. Could it have

been drawn round as instantaneously, it would have been. The purpose is

throughout determined; there is no scrawling, as in vulgar sketching.[1]

§ 8. Again, Fig. 98 is a facsimile of one of Turner's "memoranda," of a

complete subject,[2] Lausanne, from the road to Fribourg.

[Illustration: FIG. 98. _To face page 184._]

This example is entirely characteristic of his usual drawings from

nature, which unite two characters, being _both_ commemorative and

determinant:--Commemorative, in so far as they note certain facts about

the place: determinant, in that they record an impression received from

the place there and then, together with the principal arrangement of the

composition in which it was afterwards to be recorded. In this mode of

sketching, Turner differs from all other men whose work I have studied.

He never draws accurately on the spot, with the intention of modifying

or composing afterwards from the materials; but instantly modifies as he

draws, placing his memoranda where they are to be ultimately used, and

taking exactly what he wants, not a fragment or line more.

§ 9. This sketch has been made in the afternoon. He had been impressed

as he walked up the hill, by the vanishing of the lake in the golden

horizon, without end of waters, and by the opposition of the pinnacled

castle and cathedral to its level breadth. That must be drawn! and from

this spot, where all the buildings are set well together. But it

lucklessly happens that, though the buildings come just where he wants

them in situation, they don't in height. For the castle (the square mass

on the right) is in reality higher than the cathedral, and would block

out the end of the lake. Down it goes instantly a hundred feet, that we

may see the lake over it; without the smallest regard for the military

position of Lausanne.

§ 10. Next: The last low spire on the left is in truth concealed behind

the nearer bank, the town running far down the hill (and climbing

another hill) in that direction. But the group oi spires, without it,

would not be rich enough to give a proper impression of Lausanne, as a

spiry place. Turner quietly sends to fetch the church from round the

corner, places it where he likes, and indicates its distance only by

aërial perspective (much greater in the pencil drawing than in the

woodcut).

§ 11. But again: Not only the spire of the lower church, but the peak of

the Rochers d'Enfer (that highest in the distance) would in reality be

out of sight; it is much farther round to the left. This would never do

either; for without it, we should have no idea that Lausanne was

opposite the mountains, nor should we have a nice sloping line to lead

us into the distance.

With the same unblushing tranquillity of mind in which he had ordered up

the church, Turner sends also to fetch the Rochers d'Enfer; and puts

_them_ also where he chooses, to crown the slope of distant hill, which,

as every traveller knows, in its decline to the west, is one of the most

notable features of the view from Lausanne.

§ 12. These modifications, easily traceable in the large features of the

design, are carried out with equal audacity and precision in every part

of it. Every one of those confused lines on the right indicates

something that is really there, only everything is shifted and sorted

into the exact places that Turner chose. The group of dark objects near

us at the foot of the bank is a cluster of mills, which, when the

picture was completed, were to be the blackest things in it, and to

throw back the castle, and the golden horizon; while the rounded touches

at the bottom, under the castle, indicate a row of trees, which follow a

brook coming out of the ravine behind us; and were going to be made very

round indeed in the picture (to oppose the spiky and angular masses of

castle) and very consecutive, in order to form another conducting line

into the distance.

§ 13. These motives, or motives like them, might perhaps be guessed on

looking at the sketch. But no one without going to the spot would

understand the meaning of the vertical lines in the left-hand lowest

corner.

They are a "memorandum" of the artificial verticalness of a low

sandstone cliff, which has been cut down there to give space for a bit

of garden belonging to a public-house beneath, from which garden a path

leads along the ravine to the Lausanne rifle ground. The value of these

vertical lines in repeating those of the cathedral is very great; it

would be greater still in the completed picture, increasing the sense of

looking down from a height, and giving grasp of, and power over, the

whole scene.

§ 14. Throughout the sketch, as in all that Turner made, the observing

and combining intellect acts in the same manner. Not a line is lost, nor

a moment of time; and though the pencil flies, and the whole thing is

literally done as fast as a piece of shorthand writing, it is to the

full as purposeful and compressed, so that while there are indeed dashes

of the pencil which are unintentional, they are only unintentional as

the form of a letter is, in fast writing, not from want of intention,

but from the accident of haste.

§ 15. I know not if the reader can understand,--I myself cannot, though

I see it to be demonstrable,--the simultaneous occurrence of idea which

produces such a drawing as this: the grasp of the whole, from the laying

of the first line, which induces continual modifications of all that is

done, out of respect to parts not done yet. No line is ever changed or

effaced: no experiment made; but every touch is placed with reference to

all that are to succeed, as to all that have gone before; every addition

takes its part, as the stones in an arch of a bridge; the last touch

locks the arch. Remove that keystone, or remove any other of the stones

of the vault, and the whole will fall.

§ 16. I repeat--the power of mind which accomplishes this, is yet wholly

inexplicable to me, as it was when first I defined it in the chapter on

imagination associative, in the second volume. But the grandeur of the

power impresses me daily more and more; and, in quitting the subject of

invention, let me assert finally, in clearest and strongest terms, that

no painting is of any true imaginative perfectness at all, unless it has

been thus conceived.

One sign of its being thus conceived may be always found in the

straightforwardness of its work. There are continual disputes among

artists as to the best way of doing things, which may nearly all be

resolved into confessions of indetermination. If you know precisely what

you want, you will not feel much hesitation in setting about it; and a

picture may be painted almost any way, so only that it can be a straight

way. Give a true painter a ground of black, white, scarlet, or green,

and out of it he will bring what you choose. From the black, brightness;

from the white, sadness; from the scarlet, coolness; from the green,

glow: he will make anything out of anything, but in each case his method

will be pure, direct, perfect, the shortest and simplest possible. You

will find him, moreover, indifferent as to succession of process. Ask

him to begin at the bottom of the picture instead of the top,--to finish

two square inches of it without touching the rest, or to lay a separate

ground for every part before finishing any;--it is all the same to him!

What he will do if left to himself, depends on mechanical convenience,

and on the time at his disposal. If he has a large brush in his hand,

and plenty of one color ground, he may lay as much as is wanted of that

color, at once, in every part of the picture where it is to occur; and

if any is left, perhaps walk to another canvas, and lay the rest of it

where it will be wanted on that. If, on the contrary, he has a small

brush in his hand, and is interested in a particular spot of the

picture, he will, perhaps, not stir from it till that bit is finished.

But the absolutely best, or centrally, and entirely _right_ way of

painting is as follows:--

§ 17. A light ground, white, red, yellow, or gray, not brown, or black.

On that an entirely accurate, and firm black outline of the whole

picture, in its principal masses. The outline to be exquisitely correct

as far as it reaches, but not to include small details; the use of it

being to limit the masses of first color. The ground-colors then to be

laid firmly, each on its own proper part of the picture, as inlaid work

in a mosaic table, meeting each other truly at the edges: as much of

each being laid as will get itself into the state which the artist

requires it to be in for his second painting, by the time he comes to

it. On this first color, the second colors and subordinate masses laid

in due order, now, of course, necessarily without previous outline, and

all small detail reserved to the last, the bracelet being not touched,

nor indicated in the last, till the arm is finished.[3]

§ 18. This is, as far as it can be expressed in few words, the right, or

Venetian way of painting; but it is incapable of absolute definition,

for it depends on the scale, the material, and the nature of the object

represented, _how much_ a great painter will do with his first color; or

how many after processes he will use. Very often the first color, richly

blended and worked into, is also the last; sometimes it wants a glaze

only to modify it; sometimes an entirely different color above it.

Turner's storm-blues, for instance, were produced by a black ground,

with opaque blue, mixed with white, struck over it.[4] The amount of

detail given in the first color will also depend on convenience. For

instance, if a jewel _fastens_ a fold of dress, a Venetian will lay

probably a piece of the jewel color in its place at the time he draws

the fold; but if the jewel _falls upon_ the dress, he will paint the

folds only in the ground color, and the jewel afterwards. For in the

first case his hand must pause, at any rate, where the fold is fastened;

so that he may as well mark the color of the gem: but he would have to

check his hand in the sweep with which he drew the drapery, if he

painted a jewel that fell upon it with the first color. So far, however,

as he can possibly use the under color, he will, in whatever he has to

superimpose. There is a pretty little instance of such economical work

in the painting of the pearls on the breast of the elder princess, in

our best Paul Veronese (Family of Darius). The lowest is about the size

of a small hazel-nut, and falls on her rose-red dress. Any other but a

Venetian would have put a complete piece of white paint over the dress,

for the whole pearl, and painted into that the colors of the stone. But

Veronese knows beforehand that all the dark side of the pearl will

reflect the red of the dress. He will not put white over the red, only

to put red over the white again. He leaves the actual dress for the dark

side of the pearl, and with two small separate touches, one white,

another brown, places its high light and shadow. This he does with

perfect care and calm; but in two decisive seconds. There is no dash,

nor display, nor hurry, nor error. The exactly right thing is done in

the exactly right place, and not one atom of color, nor moment of time

spent vainly. Look close at the two touches,--you wonder what they mean.

Retire six feet from the picture--the pearl is there!

§ 19. The degree in which the ground colors are extended over his

picture, as he works, is to a great painter absolutely indifferent. It

is all the same to him whether he grounds a head, and finishes it at

once to the shoulders, leaving all round it white; or whether he grounds

the whole picture. His harmony, paint as he will, never can be complete

till the last touch is given; so long as it remains incomplete, he does

not care how little of it is suggested, or how many notes are missing.

All is wrong till all is right; and he must be able to bear the

all-wrongness till his work is done, or he cannot paint at all. His mode

of treatment will, therefore, depend on the nature of his subject; as is

beautifully shown in the water-color sketches by Turner in the National

Gallery. His general system was to complete inch by inch; leaving the

paper quite white all round, especially if the work was to be delicate.

The most exquisite drawings left unfinished in the collection--those at

Rome and Naples--are thus outlined accurately on pure white paper, begun

in the middle of the sheet, and worked out to the side, finishing as he

proceeds. If, however, any united effect of light or color is to embrace

a large part of the subject, he will lay it in with a broad wash over

the whole paper at once; then paint into it using it as a ground, and

modifying it in the pure Venetian manner. His oil pictures were laid

roughly with ground colors, and painted into with such rapid skill, that

the artists who used to see him finishing at the Academy sometimes

suspected him of having the picture finished underneath the colors he

showed, and removing, instead of adding, as they watched.

§ 20. But, whatever the means used may be, the certainty and directness

of them imply absolute grasp of the whole subject, and without this

grasp there is no good painting. This, finally, let me declare, without

qualification--that partial conception is no conception. The whole

picture must be imagined, or none of it is. And this grasp of the whole

implies very strange and sublime qualities of mind. It is not possible,

unless the feelings are completely under control; the least excitement

or passion will disturb the measured equity of power; a painter needs to

be as cool as a general; and as little moved or subdued by his sense of

pleasure, as a soldier by the sense of pain. Nothing good can be done

without intense feeling; but it must be feeling so crushed, that the

work is set about with mechanical steadiness, absolutely untroubled, as

a surgeon,--not without pity, but conquering it and putting it

aside--begins an operation. Until the feelings can give strength enough

to the will to enable it to conquer them, they are not strong enough. If

you cannot leave your picture at any moment;--cannot turn from it and go

on with another, while the color is drying;--cannot work at any part of

it you choose with equal contentment--you have not firm enough grasp of

it.

§ 21. It follows also, that no vain or selfish person can possibly

paint, in the noble sense of the word. Vanity and selfishness are

troublous, eager, anxious, petulant:--painting can only be done in calm

of mind. Resolution is not enough to secure this; it must be secured by

disposition as well. You may resolve to think of your picture only; but,

if you have been fretted before beginning, no manly or clear grasp of it

will be possible for you. No forced calm is calm enough. Only honest

calm,--natural calm. You might as well try by external pressure to

smoothe a lake till it could reflect the sky, as by violence of effort

to secure the peace through which only you can reach imagination. That

peace must come in its own time; as the waters settle themselves into

clearness as well as quietness; you can no more filter your mind into

purity than you can compress it into calmness; you must keep it pure, if

you would have it pure; and throw no stones into it, if you would have

it quiet. Great courage and self-command may, to a certain extent, give

power of painting without the true calmness underneath; but never of

doing first-rate work. There is sufficient evidence of this, in even

what we know of great men, though of the greatest, we nearly always know

the least (and that necessarily; they being very silent, and not much

given to setting themselves forth to questioners; apt to be

contemptuously reserved, no less than unselfishly). But in such writings

and sayings as we possess of theirs, we may trace a quite curious

gentleness and serene courtesy. Rubens' letters are almost ludicrous in

their unhurried politeness. Reynolds, swiftest of painters, was gentlest

of companions; so also Velasquez, Titian, and Veronese.

§ 22. It is gratuitous to add that no shallow or petty person can paint.

Mere cleverness or special gift never made an artist. It is only

perfectness of mind, unity, depth, decision, the highest qualities, in

fine, of the intellect, which will form the imagination.

§ 23. And, lastly, no false person can paint. A person false at heart

may, when it suits his purposes, seize a stray truth here or there; but

the relations of truth,--its perfectness,--that which makes it wholesome

truth, he can never perceive. As wholeness and wholesomeness go

together, so also sight with sincerity; it is only the constant desire

of, and submissiveness to truth, which can measure its strange angles

and mark its infinite aspects; and fit them and knit them into the

strength of sacred invention.

Sacred, I call it deliberately; for it is thus, in the most accurate

senses, humble as well as helpful; meek in its receiving, as magnificent

in its disposing; the name it bears being rightly given to invention

formal, not because it forms, but because it finds. For you cannot find

a lie; you must make it for yourself. False things may be imagined, and

false things composed; but only truth can be invented.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The word in the uppermost note, to the right of the sun, is

"red;" the others, "yellow," "purple," "cold" light gray. He always

noted the colors of the skies in this way.

[2] It is not so good a facsimile as those I have given from Durer,

for the original sketch is in light pencil; and the thickening and

delicate emphasis of the lines, on which nearly all the beauty of the

drawing depended, cannot be expressed in the woodcut, though marked

by a double line as well as I could. But the figure will answer its

purpose well enough in showing Turner's mode of sketching.

[3] Thus, in the Holy Family of Titian, lately purchased for the

National Gallery, the piece of St. Catherine's dress over her

shoulders is painted on the under dress, after that was dry. All its

value would have been lost, had the slightest tint or trace of it

been given previously. This picture, I think, and certainly many of

Tintoret's, are painted on dark grounds; but this is to save time,

and with some loss to the future brightness of the color.

[4] In cleaning the "Hero and Leander," now in the National

collection, these upper glazes were taken off, and only the black

ground left. I remember the picture when its distance was of the most

exquisite blue. I have no doubt the "Fire at Sea" has had its

distance destroyed in the same manner.

PART IX.

OF IDEAS OF RELATION:--II. OF INVENTION SPIRITUAL.

CHAPTER I.

THE DARK MIRROR.

§ 1. In the course of our inquiry into the moral of landscape (Vol.

III., chap. 17), we promised, at the close of our work, to seek for some

better, or at least clearer, conclusions than were then possible to us.

We confined ourselves in that chapter to the vindication of the probable

utility of the _love_ of natural scenery. We made no assertion of the

usefulness of _painting_ such scenery. It might be well to delight in

the real country, or admire the real flowers and true mountains. But it

did not follow that it was advisable to paint them.

Far from it. Many reasons might be given why we should not paint them.

All the purposes of good which we saw that the beauty of nature could

accomplish, may be better fulfilled by the meanest of her realities than

by the brightest of imitations. For prolonged entertainment, no picture

can be compared with the wealth of interest which may be found in the

herbage of the poorest field, or blossoms of the narrowest copse. As

suggestive of supernatural power, the passing away of a fitful

rain-cloud, or opening of dawn, are in their change and mystery more

pregnant than any pictures. A child would, I suppose, receive a

religious lesson from a flower more willingly than from a print of one,

and might be taught to understand the nineteenth Psalm, on a starry

night, better than by diagrams of the constellations.

Whence it might seem a waste of time to draw landscape at all.

I believe it is;--to draw landscape mere and solitary, however beautiful

(unless it be for the sake of geographical or other science, or of

historical record). But there _is_ a kind of landscape which it is not

inexpedient to draw. What kind, we may probably discover by considering

that which mankind has hitherto contented itself with painting.

§ 2. We may arrange nearly all existing landscape under the following

heads:--

I. HEROIC.--Representing an imaginary world, inhabited by men not

perhaps perfectly civilized, but noble, and usually subjected to severe

trials, and by spiritual powers of the highest order. It is frequently

without architecture; never without figure-action, or emotion. Its

principal master is Titian.

II. CLASSICAL.--Representing an imaginary world, inhabited by perfectly

civilized men, and by spiritual powers of an inferior order.

It generally assumes this condition of things to have existed among the

Greek and Roman nations. It contains usually architecture of an elevated

character, and always incidents of figure-action and emotion. Its

principal master is Nicolo Poussin.

III. PASTORAL.--Representing peasant life and its daily work, or such

scenery as may naturally be suggestive of it, consisting usually of

simple landscape, in part subjected to agriculture, with figures,

cattle, and domestic buildings. No supernatural being is ever visibly

present. It does not in ordinary cases admit architecture of an elevated

character, nor exciting incident. Its principal master is Cuyp.

IV. CONTEMPLATIVE.--Directed principally to the observance of the powers

of Nature, and record of the historical associations connected with

landscape, illustrated by, or contrasted with, existing states of human

life. No supernatural being is visibly present. It admits every variety

of subject, and requires, in general, figure incident, but not of an

exciting character. It was not developed completely until recent times.

Its principal master is Turner.[1]

§ 3. These are the four true orders of landscape, not of course

distinctly separated from each other in all cases, but very distinctly

in typical examples. Two spurious forms require separate note.

(A.) PICTURESQUE.--This is indeed rather the degradation (or sometimes

the undeveloped state) of the Contemplative, than a distinct class; but

it may be considered generally as including pictures meant to display

the skill of the artist, and his powers of composition; or to give

agreeable forms and colors, irrespective of sentiment. It will include

much modern art, with the street views and church interiors of the

Dutch, and the works of Canaletto, Guardi, Tempesta, and the like.

(B.) HYBRID.--Landscape in which the painter endeavors to unite the

irreconcileable sentiment of two or more of the above-named classes. Its

principal masters are Berghem and Wouvermans.

§ 4. Passing for the present by these inferior schools, we find that all

true landscape, whether simple or exalted, depends primarily for its

interest on connection with humanity, or with spiritual powers. Banish

your heroes and nymphs from the classical landscape--its laurel shades

will move you no more. Show that the dark clefts of the most romantic

mountain are uninhabited and untraversed; it will cease to be romantic.

Fields without shepherds and without fairies will have no gaiety in

their green, nor will the noblest masses of ground or colors of cloud

arrest or raise your thoughts, if the earth has no life to sustain, and

the heaven none to refresh.

§ 5. It might perhaps be thought that, since from scenes in which the

figure was principal, and landscape symbolical and subordinate (as in

the art of Egypt), the process of ages had led us to scenes in which

landscape was principal and the figure subordinate,--a continuance in

the same current of feeling might bring forth at last an art from which

humanity and its interests should wholly vanish, leaving us to the

passionless admiration of herbage and stone. But this will not, and

cannot be. For observe the parallel instance in the gradually

increasing importance of dress. From the simplicity of Greek design,

concentrating, I suppose, its skill chiefly on the naked form, the

course of time developed conditions of Venetian imagination which found

nearly as much interest, and expressed nearly as much dignity, in folds

of dress and fancies of decoration as in the faces of the figures

themselves; so that if from Veronese's Marriage in Cana we remove the

architecture and the gay dresses, we shall not in the faces and hands

remaining, find a satisfactory abstract of the picture. But try it the

other way. Take out the faces; leave the draperies, and how then? Put

the fine dresses and jewelled girdles into the best group you can; paint

them with all Veronese's skill: will they satisfy you?

§ 6. Not so. As long as they are in their due service and

subjection--while their folds are formed by the motion of men, and their

lustre adorns the nobleness of men--so long the lustre and the folds are

lovely. But cast them from the human limbs;--golden circlet and silken

tissue are withered; the dead leaves of autumn are more precious than

they.

This is just as true, but in a far deeper sense, of the weaving of the

natural robe of man's soul. Fragrant tissue of flowers, golden circlets

of clouds, are only fair when they meet the fondness of human thoughts,

and glorify human visions of heaven.

§ 7. It is the leaning on this truth which, more than any other, has

been the distinctive character of all my own past work. And in closing a

series of Art-studies, prolonged during so many years, it may be perhaps

permitted me to point out this specialty--the rather that it has been,

of all their characters, the one most denied. I constantly see that the

same thing takes place in the estimation formed by the modern public of

the work of almost any true person, living or dead. It is not needful to

state here the causes of such error: but the fact is indeed so, that

precisely the distinctive root and leading force of any true man's work

and way are the things denied concerning him.

And in these books of mine, their distinctive character, as essays on

art, is their bringing everything to a root in human passion or human

hope. Arising first not in any desire to explain the principles of art,

but in the endeavor to defend an individual painter from injustice,

they have been colored throughout,--nay, continually altered in shape,

and even warped and broken, by digressions respecting social questions,

which had for me an interest tenfold greater than the work I had been

forced into undertaking. Every principle of painting which I have stated

is traced to some vital or spiritual fact; and in my works on

architecture the preference accorded finally to one school over another,

is founded on a comparison of their influences on the life of the

workman--a question by all other writers on the subject of architecture

wholly forgotten or despised.

§ 8. The essential connection of the power of landscape with human

emotion is not less certain, because in many impressive pictures the

link is slight or local. That the connection should exist at a single

point is all that we need. The comparison with the dress of the body may

be carried out into the extremest parallelism. It may often happen that

no part of the figure wearing the dress is discernible, nevertheless,

the perceivable fact that the drapery is worn by a figure makes all the

difference. In one of the most sublime figures in the world this is

actually so: one of the fainting Marys in Tintoret's Crucifixion has

cast her mantle over her head, and her face is lost in its shade, and

her whole figure veiled in folds of gray. But what the difference is

between that gray woof, that gathers round her as she falls, and the

same folds cast in a heap upon the ground, that difference, and more,

exists between the power of Nature through which humanity is seen, and

her power in the desert. Desert--whether of leaf or sand--true

desertness is not in the want of leaves, but of life. Where humanity is

not, and was not, the best natural beauty is more than vain. It is even

terrible; not as the dress cast aside from the body; but as an

embroidered shroud hiding a skeleton.

§ 9. And on each side of a right feeling in this matter there lie, as

usual, two opposite errors.

The first, that of caring for man only; and for the rest of the

universe, little, or not at all, which, in a measure, was the error of

the Greeks and Florentines; the other, that of caring for the universe

only;--for man, not at all,--which, in a measure, is the error of modern

science, and of the Art connecting itself with such science.

The degree of power which any man may ultimately possess in

landscape-painting will depend finally on his perception of this

influence. If he has to paint the desert, its awfulness--if the garden,

its gladsomeness--will arise simply and only from his sensibility to the

story of life. Without this he is nothing but a scientific mechanist;

this, though it cannot make him yet a painter, raises him to the sphere

in which he may become one. Nay, the mere shadow and semblance of this

have given dangerous power to works in all other respects unnoticeable;

and the least degree of its true presence has given value to work in all

other respects vain.

The true presence, observe, of sympathy with the spirit of man. Where

this is not, sympathy with any higher spirit is impossible.

For the directest manifestation of Deity to man is in His own image,

that is, in man.

§ 10. "In his own image. After his likeness." _Ad imaginem et

similitudinem Suam._ I do not know what people in general understand by

those words. I suppose they ought to be understood. The truth they

contain seems to lie at the foundation of our knowledge both of God and

man; yet do we not usually pass the sentence by, in dull reverence,

attaching no definite sense to it at all? For all practical purpose,

might it not as well be out of the text?

I have no time, nor much desire, to examine the vague expressions of

belief with which the verse has been encumbered. Let us try to find its

only possible plain significance.

§ 11. It cannot be supposed that the bodily shape of man resembles, or

resembled, any bodily shape in Deity. The likeness must therefore be, or

have been, in the soul. Had it wholly passed away, and the Divine soul

been altered into a soul brutal or diabolic, I suppose we should have

been told of the change. But we are told nothing of the kind. The verse

still stands as if for our use and trust. It was only death which was to

be our punishment. Not _change_. So far as we live, the image is still

there; defiled, if you will; broken, if you will; all but effaced, if

you will, by death and the shadow of it. But not changed. We are not

made now in any other image than God's. There are, indeed, the two

states of this image--the earthly and heavenly, but both Adamite, both

human, both the same likeness; only one defiled, and one pure. So that

the soul of man is still a mirror, wherein may be seen, darkly, the

image of the mind of God.

These may seem daring words. I am sorry that they do; but I am helpless

to soften them. Discover any other meaning of the text if you are

able;--but be sure that it _is_ a meaning--a meaning in your head and

heart;--not a subtle gloss, nor a shifting of one verbal expression into

another, both idealess. I repeat, that, to me, the verse has, and can

have, no other signification than this--that the soul of man is a mirror

of the mind of God. A mirror dark, distorted, broken, use what blameful

words you please of its state; yet in the main, a true mirror, out of

which alone, and by which alone, we can know anything of God at all.

"How?" the reader, perhaps, answers indignantly. "I know the nature of

God by revelation, not by looking into myself."

Revelation to what? To a nature incapable of receiving truth? That

cannot be; for only to a nature capable of truth, desirous of it,

distinguishing it, feeding upon it, revelation is possible. To a being

undesirous of it, and hating it, revelation is impossible. There can be

none to a brute, or fiend. In so far, therefore, as you love truth, and

live therein, in so far revelation can exist for you;--and in so far,

your mind is the image of God's.

§ 12. But consider farther, not only _to_ what, but _by_ what, is the

revelation. By sight? or word? If by sight, then to eyes which see

justly. Otherwise, no sight would be revelation. So far, then, as your

sight is just, it is the image of God's sight.

If by words,--how do you know their meanings? Here is a short piece of

precious word revelation, for instance. "God is love."

Love! yes. But what is _that_? The revelation does not tell you that, I

think. Look into the mirror, and you will see. Out of your own heart you

may know what love is. In no other possible way,--by no other help or

sign. All the words and sounds ever uttered, all the revelations of

cloud, or flame, or crystal, are utterly powerless. They cannot tell

you, in the smallest point, what love means. Only the broken mirror

can.

§ 13. Here is more revelation. "God is just!" Just! What is that? The

revelation cannot help you to discover. You say it is dealing equitably

or equally. But how do you discern the equality? Not by inequality of

mind; not by a mind incapable of weighing, judging, or distributing. If

the lengths seem unequal in the broken mirror, for you they are unequal;

but if they seem equal, then the mirror is true. So far as you recognize

equality, and your conscience tells you what is just, so far your mind

is the image of God's: and so far as you do _not_ discern this nature of

justice or equality, the words "God is just" bring no revelation to you.

§ 14. "But His thoughts are not as our thoughts." No: the sea is not as

the standing pool by the wayside. Yet when the breeze crisps the pool,

you may see the image of the breakers, and a likeness of the foam. Nay,

in some sort, the same foam. If the sea is for ever invisible to you,

something you may learn of it from the pool. Nothing, assuredly, any

otherwise.

"But this poor miserable Me! Is _this_, then, all the book I have got to

read about God in?" Yes, truly so. No other book, nor fragment of book,

than that, will you ever find;--no velvet-bound missal, nor

frankincensed manuscript;--nothing hieroglyphic nor cuneiform; papyrus

and pyramid are alike silent on this matter;--nothing in the clouds

above, nor in the earth beneath. That flesh-bound volume is the only

revelation that is, that was, or that can be. In that is the image of

God painted; in that is the law of God written; in that is the promise

of God revealed. Know thyself; for through thyself only thou canst know

God.

§ 15. Through the glass, darkly. But, except through the glass, in

nowise.

A tremulous crystal, waved as water, poured out upon the ground;--you

may defile it, despise it, pollute it at your pleasure, and at your

peril; for on the peace of those weak waves must all the heaven you

shall ever gain be first seen; and through such purity as you can win

for those dark waves, must all the light of the risen Sun of

righteousness be bent down, by faint refraction. Cleanse them, and calm

them, as you love your life.

Therefore it is that all the power of nature depends on subjection to

the human soul. Man is the sun of the world; more than the real sun. The

fire of his wonderful heart is the only light and heat worth gauge or

measure. Where he is, are the tropics; where he is not, the ice-world.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] I have been embarrassed in assigning the names to these orders of

art, the term "Contemplative" belonging in justice nearly as much to

the romantic and pastoral conception as to the modern landscape. I

intended, originally, to call the four schools--Romantic, Classic,

Georgic, and Theoretic--which would have been more accurate; and more

consistent with the nomenclature of the second volume; but would not

have been pleasant in sound, nor to the general reader, very clear in

sense.