THE HESPERID ÆGLÉ.
§ 1. Five years after the Hesperides were painted, another great
mythological subject appeared by Turner's hand. Another dragon--this
time not triumphant, but in death-pang; the Python, slain by Apollo.
Not in a garden, this slaying, but in a hollow, among wildest rocks,
beside a stagnant pool. Yet, instead of the sombre coloring of the
Hesperid hills, strange gleams of blue and gold flit around the mountain
peaks, and color the clouds above them.
The picture is at once the type, and the first expression of a great
change which was passing in Turner's mind. A change, which was not
clearly manifested in all its results until much later in his life; but
in the coloring of this picture are the first signs of it; and in the
subject of this picture, its symbol.
§ 2. Had Turner died early, the reputation he would have left, though
great and enduring, would have been strangely different from that which
ultimately must now attach to his name. He would have been remembered as
one of the severest of painters; his iron touch and positive form would
have been continually opposed to the delicacy of Claude and richness of
Titian; he would have been spoken of, popularly, as a man who had no eye
for color. Perhaps here and there a watchful critic might have shown
this popular idea to be false; but no conception could have been formed
by any one of the man's real disposition or capacity.
It was only after the year 1820 that these were determinable, and his
peculiar work discerned.
§ 3. He had begun by faithful declaration of the sorrow there was in the
world. It is now permitted him to see also its beauty. He becomes,
separately and without rival, the painter of the loveliness and light of
the creation.
[Illustration: 79. The Hesperid Æglé.]
Of its loveliness: that which may be beloved in it, the tenderest,
kindest, most feminine of its aspects. Of its light: light not merely
diffused, but interpreted; light seen pre-eminently in color.
Claude and Cuyp had painted the sun_shine_, Turner alone the sun
_color_.
Observe this accurately. Those easily understood effects of afternoon
light, gracious and sweet so far as they reach, are produced by the
softly warm or yellow rays of the sun falling through mist. They are low
in tone, even in nature, and disguise the colors of objects. They are
imitable even by persons who have little or no gift of color, if the
tones of the picture are kept low and in true harmony, and the reflected
lights warm. But they never could be painted by great colorists. The
fact of blue and crimson being effaced by yellow and gray, puts such
effect at once out of the notice or thought of a colorist, unless he has
some special interest in the motive of it. You might as well ask a
musician to compose with only three notes, as Titian to paint without
crimson and blue. Accordingly the colorists in general, feeling that no
other than this yellow sunshine was imitable, refused it, and painted in
twilight, when the color was full. Therefore, from the imperfect
colorists,--from Cuyp, Claude, Both, Wilson, we get deceptive effect of
sunshine; never from the Venetians, from Rubens, Reynolds or Velasquez.
From these we get only conventional substitutions for it, Rubens being
especially daring[1] in frankness of symbol.
§ 4. Turner, however, as a landscape painter, had to represent sunshine
of one kind or another. He went steadily through the subdued golden
chord, and painted Cuyp's favorite effect, "sun rising through vapor,"
for many a weary year. But this was not enough for him. He must paint
the sun in his strength, the sun rising _not_ through vapor. If you
glance at that Apollo slaying the Python, you will see there is rose
color and blue on the clouds, as well as gold; and if then you turn to
the Apollo in the Ulysses and Polyphemus--his horses are rising beyond
the horizon,--you see he is not "rising through vapor," but above it;
gaining somewhat of a victory over vapor, it appears.
The old Dutch brewer, with his yellow mist, was a great man and a good
guide, but he was not Apollo. He and his dray-horses led the way through
the flats, cheerily, for a little time; we have other horses now flaming
out "beyond the mighty sea."
A victory over vapor of many kinds; Python-slaying in general. Look how
the Python's jaws smoke as he falls back between the rocks:--a vaporous
serpent! We will see who he was, presently.
The public remonstrated loudly in the cause of Python: "He had been so
yellow, quiet, and pleasant a creature; what meant these azure-shafted
arrows, this sudden glare into darkness, this Iris message;
Thaumantian;--miracle-working; scattering our slumber down in Cocytus?"
It meant much, but that was not what they should have first asked about
it. They should have asked simply, was it a true message? Were these
Thaumantian things so, in the real universe?
It might have been known easily they were. One fair dawn or sunset,
obediently beheld, would have set them right; and shown that Turner was
indeed the only true speaker concerning such things that ever yet had
appeared in the world. They would neither look nor hear;--only shouted
continuously, "Perish Apollo. Bring us back Python."
§ 5. We must understand the real meaning of this cry, for herein rests
not merely the question of the great right or wrong in Turner's life,
but the question of the right or wrong of all painting. Nay, on this
issue hangs the nobleness of painting as an art altogether, for it is
distinctively the art of coloring, not of shaping or relating. Sculptors
and poets can do these, the painter's own work is color.
Thus, then, for the last time, rises the question, what is the true
dignity of color? We left that doubt a little while ago among the
clouds, wondering what they had been made so scarlet for. Now Turner
brings the doubt back to us, unescapable any more. No man, hitherto, had
painted the clouds scarlet. Hesperid Æglé, and Erytheia, throned there
in the west, fade into the twilights of four thousand years,
unconfessed. Here is at last one who confesses them, but is it well? Men
say these Hesperids are sensual goddesses,--traitresses,--that the
Graiæ are the only true ones. Nature made the western and the eastern
clouds splendid in fallacy. Crimson is impure and vile; let us paint in
black if we would be virtuous.
§ 6. Note, with respect to this matter, that the peculiar innovation of
Turner was the perfection of the color chord by means of _scarlet_.
Other painters had rendered the golden tones, and the blue tones, of
sky; Titian especially the last, in perfectness. But none had dared to
paint, none seem to have seen, the scarlet and purple.
Nor was it only in seeing this color in vividness when it occurred in
full light, that Turner differed from preceding painters. His most
distinctive innovation as a colorist was his discovery of the scarlet
_shadow_. "True, there is a sunshine whose light is golden, and its
shadow gray; but there is another sunshine, and that the purest, whose
light is white, and its shadow scarlet." This was the essentially
offensive, inconceivable thing, which he could not be believed in. There
was some ground for the incredulity, because no color is vivid enough to
express the pitch of light of pure white sunshine, so that the color
given without the true intensity of light _looks_ false. Nevertheless,
Turner could not but report of the color truly. "I must indeed be lower
in the key, but that is no reason why I should be false in the note.
Here is sunshine which glows even when subdued; it has not cool shade,
but fiery shade."[2] This is the glory of sunshine.
§ 7. Now, this scarlet color,--or pure red, intensified by expression of
light,--is, of all the three primitive colors, that which is most
distinctive. Yellow is of the nature of simple light; blue, connected
with simple shade; but red is an entirely abstract color. It is red to
which the color-blind are blind, as if to show us that it was not
necessary merely for the service or comfort of man, but that there was a
special gift or teaching in this color. Observe, farther, that it is
this color which the sunbeams take in passing through the _earth's
atmosphere_. The rose of dawn and sunset is the hue of the rays passing
close over the earth. It is also concentrated in the blood of man.
[Illustration: 80. Rocks at Rest.]
§ 8. Unforeseen requirements have compelled me to disperse through
various works, undertaken between the first and last portions of this
essay, the examination of many points respecting color, which I had
intended to reserve for this place. I can now only refer the reader to
these several passages,[3] and sum their import: which is briefly,
that color generally, but chiefly the scarlet, used with the hyssop, in
the Levitical law, is the great sanctifying element of visible beauty
inseparably connected with purity and life.
[Illustration: 81. Rocks in Unrest.]
I must not enter here into the solemn and far-reaching fields of thought
which it would be necessary to traverse, in order to detect the mystical
connection between life and love, set forth in that Hebrew system of
sacrificial religion to which we may trace most of the received ideas
respecting sanctity, consecration, and purification. This only I must
hint to the reader--for his own following out--that if he earnestly
examines the original sources from which our heedless popular language
respecting the washing away of sins has been borrowed, he will find that
the fountain in which sins are indeed to be washed away, is that of
love, not of agony.
§ 9. But, without approaching the presence of this deeper meaning of the
sign, the reader may rest satisfied with the connection given him
directly in written words, between the cloud and its bow. The cloud, or
firmament, as we have seen, signifies the ministration of the heavens to
man. That ministration may be in judgment or mercy--in the lightning, or
the dew. But the bow, or color, of the cloud, signifies always mercy,
the sparing of life; such ministry of the heaven, as shall feed and
prolong life. And as the sunlight, undivided, is the type of the wisdom
and righteousness of God, so divided, and softened into color by means
of the fundamental ministry, fitted to every need of man, as to every
delight, and becoming one chief source of human beauty, by being made
part of the flesh of man;--thus divided, the sunlight is the type of the
wisdom of God, becoming sanctification and redemption. Various in
work--various in beauty--various in power.
Color is, therefore, in brief terms, the type of love. Hence it is
especially connected with the blossoming of the earth; and again, with
its fruits; also, with the spring and fall of the leaf, and with the
morning and evening of the day, in order to show the waiting of love
about the birth and death of man.
§ 10. And now, I think, we may understand, even far away in the Greek
mind, the meaning of that contest of Apollo with the Python. It was a
far greater contest than that of Hercules with Ladon. Fraud and avarice
might be overcome by frankness and force; but this Python was a darker
enemy, and could not be subdued but by a greater god. Nor was the
conquest slightly esteemed by the victor deity. He took his great name
from it thenceforth--his prophetic and sacred name--the Pythian.
It could, therefore, be no merely devouring dragon--no mere wild beast
with scales and claws. It must possess some more terrible character to
make conquest over it so glorious. Consider the meaning of its name,
"THE CORRUPTER." That Hesperid dragon was a treasure-guardian. This is
the treasure-destroyer,--where moth and rust doth corrupt--the worm of
eternal decay.
Apollo's contest with him is the strife of purity with pollution; of
life, with forgetfulness; of love, with the grave.
§ 11. I believe this great battle stood, in the Greek mind, for the type
of the struggle of youth and manhood with deadly sin--venomous,
infectious, irrecoverable sin. In virtue of his victory over this
corruption, Apollo becomes thenceforward the guide; the witness; the
purifying and helpful God. The other gods help waywardly, whom they
choose. But Apollo helps always: he is by name, not only Pythian, the
conqueror of death; but Pæan--the healer of the people.
Well did Turner know the meaning of that battle: he has told its tale
with fearful distinctness. The Mammon dragon was armed with adamant; but
this dragon of decay is a mere colossal worm: wounded, he bursts asunder
in the midst,[4] and melts to pieces, rather than dies, vomiting
smoke--a smaller serpent-worm rising out of his blood.
§ 12. Alas, for Turner! This smaller serpent-worm, it seemed, he could
not conceive to be slain. In the midst of all the power and beauty of
nature, he still saw this death-worm writhing among the weeds. A little
thing now, yet enough; you may see it in the foreground of the Bay of
Baiæ, which has also in it the story of Apollo and the Sibyl; Apollo
giving love; but not youth, nor immortality: you may see it again in the
foreground of the Lake Avernus--the Hades lake--which Turner surrounds
with delicatest beauty, the Fates dancing in circle; but in front, is
the serpent beneath the thistle and the wild thorn. The same Sibyl,
Deiphobe, holding the golden bough. I cannot get at the meaning of this
legend of the bough; but it was, assuredly, still connected, in
Turner's mind, with that help from Apollo. He indicated the strength of
his feeling at the time when he painted the Python contest, by the
drawing exhibited the same year, of the Prayer of Chryses. There the
priest is on the beach alone, the sun setting. He prays to it as it
descends;--flakes of its sheeted light are borne to him by the
melancholy waves, and cast away with sighs upon the sand.
How this sadness came to be persistent over Turner, and to conquer him,
we shall see in a little while. It is enough for us to know at present
that our most wise and Christian England, with all her appurtenances of
school-porch and church-spire, had so disposed her teaching as to leave
this somewhat notable child of hers without even cruel Pandora's gift.
He was without hope.
True daughter of Night, Hesperid Æglé was to him; coming between
Censure, and Sorrow,--and the Destinies.
§ 13. What, for us, his work yet may be, I know not. But let not the
real nature of it be misunderstood any more.
He is distinctively, as he rises into his own peculiar strength,
separating himself from all men who had painted forms of the physical
world before,--the painter of the loveliness of nature, with the worm at
its root: Rose and cankerworm,--both with his utmost strength; the one
_never_ separate from the other.
In which his work was the true image of his own mind.
I would fain have looked last at the rose; but that is not the way
Atropos will have it, and there is no pleading with her.
So, therefore, first of the rose.
§ 14. That is to say, of this vision of the loveliness and kindness of
Nature, as distinguished from all visions of her ever received by other
men. By the Greek, she had been distrusted. She was to him Calypso, the
Concealer, Circe, the Sorceress. By the Venetian, she had been dreaded.
Her wildernesses were desolate; her shadows stern. By the Fleming, she
had been despised; what mattered the heavenly colors to him? But at
last, the time comes for her loveliness and kindness to be declared to
men. Had they helped Turner, listened to him, believed in him, he had
done it wholly for them. But they cried out for Python, and Python
came;--came literally as well as spiritually;--all the perfectest beauty
and conquest which Turner wrought is already withered. The cankerworm
stood at his right hand, and of all his richest, most precious work,
there remains only the shadow. Yet that shadow is more than other men's
sunlight; it is the scarlet shade, shade of the Rose. Wrecked, and
faded, and defiled, his work still, in what remains of it, or may
remain, is the loveliest ever yet done by man, in imagery of the
physical world. Whatsoever is there of fairest, you will find recorded
by Turner, and by him alone.
§ 15. I say _you_ will find, not knowing to how few I speak; for in
order to find what is fairest, you must delight in what is fair; and I
know not how few or how many there may be who take such delight. Once I
could speak joyfully about beautiful things, thinking to be
understood;--now I cannot any more; for it seems to me that no one
regards them. Wherever I look or travel in England or abroad, I see that
men, wherever they can reach, destroy all beauty. They seem to have no
other desire or hope but to have large houses and to be able to move
fast. Every perfect and lovely spot which they can touch, they
defile.[5]
§ 16. Nevertheless, though not joyfully, or with any hope of being at
present heard, I would have tried to enter here into some examination of
the right and worthy effect of beauty in Art upon human mind, if I had
been myself able to come to demonstrable conclusions. But the question
is so complicated with that of the enervating influence of all luxury,
that I cannot get it put into any tractable compass. Nay, I have many
inquiries to make, many difficult passages of history to examine, before
I can determine the just limits of the hope in which I may permit myself
to continue to labor in any cause of Art.
Nor is the subject connected with the purpose of this book. I have
written it to show that Turner is the greatest landscape painter who
ever lived; and this it has sufficiently accomplished. What the final
use may be to men, of landscape painting, or of any painting, or of
natural beauty, I do not yet know. Thus far, however, I _do_ know.
§ 17. Three principal forms of asceticism have existed in this weak
world. Religious asceticism, being the refusal of pleasure and knowledge
for the sake (as supposed) of religion; seen chiefly in the middle ages.
Military asceticism, being the refusal of pleasure and knowledge for the
sake of power; seen chiefly in the early days of Sparta and Rome. And
monetary asceticism, consisting in the refusal of pleasure and knowledge
for the sake of money; seen in the present days of London and
Manchester.
"We do not come here to look at the mountains," said the Carthusian to
me at the Grande Chartreuse. "We do not come here to look at the
mountains," the Austrian generals would say, encamping by the shores of
Garda. "We do not come here to look at the mountains," so the thriving
manufacturers tell me, between Rochdale and Halifax.
§ 18. All these asceticisms have their bright, and their dark sides. I
myself like the military asceticism best, because it is not so
necessarily a refusal of general knowledge as the two others, but leads
to acute and marvellous use of mind, and perfect use of body.
Nevertheless, none of the three are a healthy or central state of man.
There is much to be respected in each, but they are not what we should
wish large numbers of men to become. A monk of La Trappe, a French
soldier of the Imperial Guard, and a thriving mill-owner, supposing each
a type, and no more than a type, of his class, are all interesting
specimens of humanity, but narrow ones,--so narrow that even all the
three together would not make a perfect man. Nor does it appear in any
way desirable that either of the three classes should extend itself so
as to include a majority of the persons in the world, and turn large
cities into mere groups of monastery, barracks, or factory. I do not say
that it may not be desirable that one city, or one country, sacrificed
for the good of the rest, should become a mass of barracks or factories.
Perhaps, it may be well that this England should become the furnace of
the world; so that the smoke of the island, rising out of the sea,
should be seen from a hundred leagues away, as if it were a field of
fierce volcanoes; and every kind of sordid, foul, or venomous work which
in other countries men dreaded or disdained, it should become England's
duty to do,--becoming thus the off-scourer of the earth, and taking the
hyena instead of the lion upon her shield. I do not, for a moment, deny
this; but, looking broadly, not at the destiny of England, nor of any
country in particular, but of the world, this is certain--that men
exclusively occupied either in spiritual reverie, mechanical
destruction, or mechanical productiveness, fall below the proper
standard of their race, and enter into a lower form of being; and that
the true perfection of the race, and, therefore, its power and
happiness, are only to be attained by a life which is neither
speculative nor productive; but essentially contemplative and
protective, which (A) does not lose itself in the monk's vision or hope,
but delights in seeing present and real things as they truly are; which
(B) does not mortify itself for the sake of obtaining powers of
destruction, but seeks the more easily attainable powers of affection,
observance, and protection; which (C), finally, does not mortify itself
with a view to productive accumulation, but delights itself in peace,
with its appointed portion. So that the things to be desired for man in
a healthy state, are that he should not see dreams, but realities; that
he should not destroy life, but save it; and that he should be not rich,
but content.
§ 19. Towards which last state of contentment, I do not see that the
world is at present approximating. There are, indeed, two forms of
discontent: one laborious, the other indolent and complaining. We
respect the man of laborious desire, but let us not suppose that his
restlessness is peace, or his ambition meekness. It is because of the
special connection of meekness with contentment that it is promised that
the meek shall "inherit the earth." Neither covetous men, nor the Grave,
can inherit anything;[6] they can but consume. Only contentment can
possess.
§ 20. The most helpful and sacred work, therefore, which can at present
be done for humanity, is to teach people (chiefly by example, as all
best teaching must be done) not how "to better themselves," but how to
"satisfy themselves." It is the curse of every evil nation and evil
creature to eat, and _not_ be satisfied. The words of blessing are, that
they shall eat and be satisfied. And as there is only one kind of water
which quenches all thirst, so there is only one kind of bread which
satisfies all hunger, the bread of justice or righteousness; which
hungering after, men shall always be filled, that being the bread of
Heaven; but hungering after the bread, or wages, of unrighteousness,
shall not be filled, that being the bread of Sodom.
§ 21. And, in order to teach men how to be satisfied, it is necessary
fully to understand the art and joy of humble life,--this, at present,
of all arts or sciences being the one most needing study. Humble
life--that is to say, proposing to itself no future exaltation, but only
a sweet continuance; not excluding the idea of foresight, but wholly of
fore-sorrow, and taking no troublous thought for coming days: so, also,
not excluding the idea of providence, or provision,[7] but wholly of
accumulation;--the life of domestic affection and domestic peace, full
of sensitiveness to all elements of costless and kind
pleasure;--therefore, chiefly to the loveliness of the natural world.
§ 22. What length and severity of labor may be ultimately found
necessary for the procuring of the due comforts of life, I do not know;
neither what degree of refinement it is possible to unite with the
so-called servile occupations of life: but this I know, that right
economy of labor will, as it is understood, assign to each man as much
as will be healthy for him, and no more; and that no refinements are
desirable which cannot be connected with toil.
I say, first, that due economy of labor will assign to each man the
share which is right. Let no technical labor be wasted on things useless
or unpleasurable;[8] and let all physical exertion, so far as possible,
be utilized, and it will be found no man need ever work more than is
good for him. I believe an immense gain in the bodily health and
happiness of the upper classes would follow on their steadily
endeavoring, however clumsily, to make the physical exertion they now
necessarily take in amusements, definitely serviceable. It would be far
better, for instance, that a gentleman should mow his own fields, than
ride over other people's.
§ 23. Again, respecting degrees of possible refinement, I cannot yet
speak positively, because no effort has yet been made to teach refined
habits to persons of simple life.
The idea of such refinement has been made to appear absurd, partly by
the foolish ambition of vulgar persons in low life, but more by the
worse than foolish assumption, acted on so often by modern advocates of
improvement, that "education" means teaching Latin, or algebra, or
music, or drawing, instead of developing or "drawing out" the human
soul.
It may not be the least necessary that a peasant should know algebra, or
Greek, or drawing. But it may, perhaps, be both possible and expedient
that he should be able to arrange his thoughts clearly, to speak his own
language intelligibly, to discern between right and wrong, to govern his
passions, and to receive such pleasures of ear or sight as his life may
render accessible to him. I would not have him taught the science of
music; but most assuredly I would have him taught to sing. I would not
teach him the science of drawing; but certainly I would teach him to
see; without learning a single term of botany, he should know accurately
the habits and uses of every leaf and flower in his fields; and
unencumbered by any theories of moral or political philosophy, he should
help his neighbor, and disdain a bribe.
§ 24. Many most valuable conclusions respecting the degree of nobleness
and refinement which may be attained in servile or in rural life may be
arrived at by a careful study of the noble writings of Blitzius
(Jeremias Gotthelf), which contain a record of Swiss character not less
valuable in its fine truth than that which Scott has left of the
Scottish. I know no ideal characters of women, whatever their station,
more majestic than that of Freneli (in Ulric le Valet de Ferme, and
Ulric le Fermier); or of Elise, in the Tour de Jacob; nor any more
exquisitely tender and refined than that of Aenneli in the Fromagerie
and Aenneli in the Miroir des Paysans.[9]
§ 25. How far this simple and useful pride, this delicate innocence,
might be adorned, or how far destroyed, by higher intellectual education
in letters or the arts, cannot be known without other experience than
the charity of men has hitherto enabled us to acquire.
All effort in social improvement is paralyzed, because no one has been
bold or clear-sighted enough to put and press home this radical
question: "What is indeed the noblest tone and reach of life for men;
and how can the possibility of it be extended to the greatest numbers?"
It is answered, broadly and rashly, that wealth is good; that knowledge
is good; that art is good; that luxury is good. Whereas none of them are
good in the abstract, but good only if rightly received. Nor have any
steps whatever been yet securely taken,--nor, otherwise than in the
resultless rhapsody of moralists,--to ascertain what luxuries and what
learning it is either kind to bestow, or wise to desire. This, however,
at least we know, shown clearly by the history of all time, that the
arts and sciences, ministering to the pride of nations, have invariably
hastened their ruin; and this, also, without venturing to say that I
know, I nevertheless firmly believe, that the same arts and sciences
will tend as distinctly to exalt the strength and quicken the soul of
every nation which employs them to increase the comfort of lowly life,
and grace with happy intelligence the unambitious courses of honorable
toil.
Thus far, then, of the Rose.
§ 26. Last, of the Worm.
I said that Turner painted the labor of men, their sorrow, and their
death. This he did nearly in the same tones of mind which prompted
Byron's poem of Childe Harold, and the loveliest result of his art, in
the central period of it, was an effort to express on a single canvas
the meaning of that poem. It may be now seen, by strange coincidence,
associated with two others--Caligula's Bridge and the Apollo and Sibyl;
the one illustrative of the vanity of human labor, the other of the
vanity of human life.[10] He painted these, as I said, in the same tone
of mind which formed the Childe Harold poem, but with different
capacity: Turner's sense of beauty was perfect; deeper, therefore, far
than Byron's; only that of Keats and Tennyson being comparable with it.
And Turner's love of truth was as stern and patient as Dante's; so that
when over these great capacities come the shadows of despair, the wreck
is infinitely sterner and more sorrowful. With no sweet home for his
childhood,--friendless in youth,--loveless in manhood,--and hopeless in
death, Turner was what Dante might have been, without the "bello ovile,"
without Casella, without Beatrice, and without Him who gave them all,
and took them all away.
§ 27. I will trace this state of his mind farther, in a little while.
Meantime, I want you to note only the result upon his work;--how,
through all the remainder of his life, wherever he looked, he saw ruin.
Ruin, and twilight. What was the distinctive effect of light which he
introduced, such as no man had painted before? Brightness, indeed, he
gave, as we have seen, because it was true and right; but in this he
only perfected what others had attempted. His own favorite light is not
Æglé, but Hesperid Æglé. Fading of the last rays of sunset. Faint
breathing of the sorrow of night.
§ 28. And fading of sunset, note also, on ruin. I cannot but wonder that
this difference between Turner's work and previous art-conception has
not been more observed. None of the great early painters draw ruins,
except compulsorily. The shattered buildings introduced by them are
shattered artificially, like models. There is no real sense of decay;
whereas Turner only momentarily dwells on anything else than ruin. Take
up the Liber Studiorum, and observe how this feeling of decay and
humiliation gives solemnity to all its simplest subjects; even to his
view of daily labor. I have marked its tendency in examining the design
of the Mill and Lock, but observe its continuance through the book.
There is no exultation in thriving city, or mart, or in happy rural
toil, or harvest gathering. Only the grinding at the mill, and patient
striving with hard conditions of life. Observe the two disordered and
poor farm-yards, cart, and ploughshare, and harrow rotting away; note
the pastoral by the brook side, with its neglected stream, and haggard
trees, and bridge with the broken rail, and decrepit
children--fever-struck--one sitting stupidly by the stagnant stream; the
other in rags, and with an old man's hat on, and lame, leaning on a
stick. Then the "Hedging and ditching," with its bleak sky and blighted
trees--hacked, and bitten, and starved by the clay soil into something
between trees and firewood; its meanly-faced, sickly laborers--pollard
laborers, like the willow trunk they hew; and the slatternly
peasant-woman, with worn cloak and battered bonnet--an English Dryad.
Then the Water-mill, beyond the fallen steps overgrown with the thistle:
itself a ruin, mud-built at first, now propped on both sides;--the
planks torn from its cattle-shed; a feeble beam, splintered at the end,
set against the dwelling-house from the ruined pier of the watercourse;
the old millstone--useless for many a day--half buried in slime, at the
bottom of the wall; the listless children, listless dog, and the poor
gleaner bringing her single sheaf to be ground. Then the "Peat bog,"
with its cold, dark rain, and dangerous labor. And last and chief, the
mill in the valley of the Chartreuse. Another than Turner would have
painted the convent; but he had no sympathy with the hope, no mercy for
the indolence of the monk. He painted the mill in the valley. Precipice
overhanging it, and wildness of dark forest round; blind rage and
strength of mountain torrent rolled beneath it,--calm sunset above, but
fading from the glen, leaving it to its roar of passionate waters and
sighing of pine-branches in the night.
§ 29. Such is his view of human labor. Of human pride, see what records.
Morpeth tower, roofless and black; gate of old Winchelsea wall, the
flock of sheep driven _round_ it, not through it; and Rievaulx choir,
and Kirkstall crypt; and Dunstanborough, wan above the sea; and
Chepstow, with arrowy light through traceried windows; and Lindisfarne,
with failing height of wasted shaft and wall; and last and sweetest,
Raglan, in utter solitude, amidst the wild wood of its own pleasance;
the towers rounded with ivy, and the forest roots choked with
undergrowth, and the brook languid amidst lilies and sedges. Legends of
gray knights and enchanted ladies keeping the woodman's children away at
the sunset.
These are his types of human pride. Of human love: Procris, dying by the
arrow; Hesperie, by the viper's fang; and Rizpah, more than dead, beside
her children.
§ 30. Such are the lessons of the Liber Studiorum. Silent always with a
bitter silence, disdaining to tell his meaning, when he saw there was no
ear to receive it, Turner only indicated this purpose by slight words of
contemptuous anger, when he heard of any one's trying to obtain this or
the other separate subject as more beautiful than the rest. "What is the
use of them," he said, "but together?"[11] The meaning of the entire
book was symbolized in the frontispiece, which he engraved with his own
hand: Tyre at sunset, with the Rape of Europa, indicating the symbolism
of the decay of Europe by that of Tyre, its beauty passing away into
terror and judgment (Europa being the mother of Minos and
Rhadamanthus).[12]
[Illustration: J. M. W. Turner J. H. Le Keux
82. The Nets in the Rapids.]
[Illustration: 83. The Bridge of Rheinfelden.]
§ 31. I need not trace the dark clue farther, the reader may follow it
unbroken through all his work and life, this thread of Atropos.[13] I
will only point, in conclusion, to the intensity with which his
imagination dwelt always on the three great cities of Carthage,
Rome, and Venice--Carthage in connection especially with the thoughts
and study which led to the painting of the Hesperides' Garden, showing
the death which attends the vain pursuit of wealth; Rome, showing the
death which attends the vain pursuit of power; Venice, the death which
attends the vain pursuit of beauty.
How strangely significative, thus understood, those last Venetian dreams
of his become, themselves so beautiful and so frail; wrecks of all that
they were once--twilights of twilight!
§ 32. Vain beauty; yet not all in vain. Unlike in birth, how like in
their labor, and their power over the future, these masters of England
and Venice--Turner and Giorgione. But ten years ago, I saw the last
traces of the greatest works of Giorgione yet glowing, like a scarlet
cloud, on the Fondaco de Tedeschi.[14] And though that scarlet cloud
(sanguigna e fiammeggiante, per cui le pitture cominciarono con dolce
violenza a rapire il cuore delle genti) may, indeed, melt away into
paleness of night, and Venice herself waste from her islands as a wreath
of wind-driven foam fades from their weedy beach;--that which she won of
faithful light and truth shall never pass away. Deiphobe of the
sea,--the Sun God measures her immortality to her by its sand. Flushed,
above the Avernus of the Adrian lake, her spirit is still seen holding
the golden bough; from the lips of the Sea Sibyl men shall learn for
ages yet to come what is most noble and most fair; and, far away, as the
whisper in the coils of the shell, withdrawn through the deep hearts of
nations, shall sound for ever the enchanted voice of Venice.
[Illustration: 84. Peace.]
[Illustration: 68. Monte Rosa. Sunset.]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] There is a very wonderful, and almost deceptive, imitation of
sunlight by Rubens at Berlin. It falls through broken clouds upon
angels, the flesh being chequered with sunlight and shade.
[2] Not, accurately speaking, shadow, but dark side. All shadow
proper is negative in color, but, generally, reflected light is
warmer than direct light; and when the direct light is warm, pure,
and of the highest intensity, its reflection is scarlet. Turner
habitually, in his later sketches, used vermilion for his pen outline
in effects of sun.
[3] The following collected system of the various statements made
respecting color in different parts of my works may be useful to the
student:--
1st. Abstract color is of far less importance than abstract form
(vol. i. chap. v.); that is to say, if it could rest in our choice
whether we would carve like Phidias (supposing Phidias had never used
color), or arrange the colors of a shawl like Indians, there is no
question as to which power we ought to choose. The difference of rank
is vast; there is no way of estimating or measuring it.
So, again, if it rest in our choice whether we will be great in
invention of form, to be expressed only by light and shade, as Durer,
or great in invention and application of color, caring only for
ungainly form, as Bassano, there is still no question. Try to be
Durer, of the two. So again, if we have to give an account or
description of anything--if it be an object of high interest--its
form will be always what we should first tell. Neither leopard spots
nor partridge's signify primarily in describing either beast or bird.
But teeth and feathers do.
2. Secondly. Though color is of less importance than form, if you
introduce it at all, it must be right.
People often speak of the Roman school as if it were greater than the
Venetian, because its color is "subordinate."
Its color is not subordinate. It is BAD.
If you paint colored objects, you must either paint them rightly or
wrongly. There is no other choice. You may introduce as little color
as you choose--a mere tint of rose in a chalk drawing, for instance;
or pale hues generally--as Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel. All
such work implies feebleness or imperfection, but not necessarily
error. But if you paint with full color, as Raphael and Leonardo, you
must either be true or false. If true, you will paint like a
Venetian. If false, your form, supremely beautiful, may draw the
attention of the spectator from the false color, or induce him to
pardon it--and, if ill-taught, even to like it; but your picture is
none the greater for that. Had Leonardo and Raphael colored like
Giorgione, their work would have been greater, not less, than it is
now.
3. To color perfectly is the rarest and most precious (technical)
power an artist can possess. There have been only seven supreme
colorists among the true painters whose works exist (namely,
Giorgione, Titian, Veronese, Tintoret, Correggio, Reynolds, and
Turner); but the names of great designers, including sculptors,
architects, and metal-workers, are multitudinous. Also, if you can
color perfectly, you are sure to be able to do everything else if you
like. There never yet was colorist who could not draw; but faculty of
perceiving form may exist alone. I believe, however, it will be found
ultimately that the _perfect_ gifts of color and form always go
together. Titian's form is nobler than Durer's, and more subtle; nor
have I any doubt but that Phidias could have painted as nobly as he
carved. But when the powers are not supreme, the wisest men usually
neglect the color-gift, and develope that of form.
I have not thought it worth while at present to enter into any
examination of the construction of Turner's color system, because the
public is at present so unconscious of the meaning and nature of
color that they would not know what I was talking of. The more than
ludicrous folly of the system of modern water-color painting, in
which it is assumed that every hue in the drawing may be beneficially
washed into every other, must prevent, as long as it influences the
popular mind, even incipient inquiry respecting color-art. But for
help of any solitary and painstaking student, it may be noted that
Turner's color is founded more on Correggio and Bassano than on the
central Venetians; it involves a more tender and constant reference
to light and shade than that of Veronese; and a more sparkling and
gem-like lustre than that of Titian. I dislike using a technical word
which has been disgraced by affectation, but there is no other word
to signify what I mean in saying that Turner's color has, to the
full, Correggio's "morbidezza," including also, in due place,
conditions of mosaic effect, like that of the colors in an Indian
design, unaccomplished by any previous master in painting; and a
fantasy of inventive arrangement corresponding to that of Beethoven
in music. In its concurrence with and expression of texture or
construction of surfaces (as their bloom, lustre, or intricacy) it
stands unrivalled--no still-life painting by any other master can
stand for an instant beside Turner's, when his work is of life-size,
as in his numerous studies of birds and their plumage. This
"morbidezza" of color is associated, precisely as it was in
Correggio, with an exquisite sensibility to fineness and intricacy of
curvature: curvature, as already noticed in the second volume, being
to lines what gradation is to colors. This subject, also, is too
difficult and too little regarded by the public, to be entered upon
here, but it must be observed that this quality of Turner's design,
the one which of all is best expressible by engraving, has of all
been least expressed, owing to the constant reduction or change of
proportion in the plates. Publishers, of course, require generally
their plates to be of one size (the plates in this book form an
appalling exception to received practice in this respect); Turner
always made his drawings longer or shorter by half an inch, or more,
according to the subject; the engravers contracted or expanded them
to fit the books, with utter destruction of the nature of every curve
in the design. Mere reduction necessarily involves such loss to some
extent; but the degree in which it probably involves it has been
curiously exemplified by the 61st Plate in this volume, reduced from
a pen-drawing of mine, 18 inches long. Fig. 101 is a facsimile of the
hook and piece of drapery, in the foreground, in my drawing, which is
very nearly true to the Turner curves: compare them with the curves
either in Plate 61, or in the published engraving in the England
series. The Plate opposite (80) is a portion of the foreground of the
drawing of the Llanberis (England Series), also of its real size; and
interesting as showing the grace of Turner's curvature even when he
was drawing fastest. It is a hasty drawing throughout, and after
finishing the rocks and water, being apparently a little tired, he
has struck out the broken fence of the watering-place for the cattle
with a few impetuous dashes of the hand. Yet the curvature and
grouping of line are still perfectly tender. How far the passage
loses by reduction, may be seen by a glance at the published
engraving.
[Illustration: FIG. 101.]
4. Color, as stated in the text, is the purifying or sanctifying
element of material beauty.
If so, how less important than form? Because, on form depends
existence; on color, only purity. Under the Levitical law, neither
scarlet nor hyssop could purify the deformed. So, under all natural
law, there must be rightly shaped members first; then sanctifying
color and fire in them.
Nevertheless, there are several great difficulties and oppositions of
aspect in this matter, which I must try to reconcile now clearly and
finally. As color is the type of Love, it resembles it in all its
modes of operation; and in practical work of human hands, it sustains
changes of worthiness precisely like those of human sexual love. That
love, when true, faithful, well-fixed, is eminently the sanctifying
element of human life: without it, the soul cannot reach its fullest
height of holiness. But if shallow, faithless, misdirected, it is
also one of the strongest corrupting and degrading elements of life.
Between these base and lofty states of Love are the loveless states;
some cold and horrible; others chaste, childish, or ascetic, bearing
to careless thinkers the semblance of purity higher than that of
Love.
So it is with the type of Love--color. Followed rashly, coarsely,
untruly, for the mere pleasure of it, with no reverence, it becomes a
temptation, and leads to corruption. Followed faithfully, with
intense but reverent passion, it is the holiest of all aspects of
material things.
Between these two modes of pursuing it, come two modes of refusing
it--one, dark and sensual; the other, statuesque and grave, having
great aspect of nobleness.
Thus we have, first, the coarse love of color, as a vulgar person's
choice of gaudy hues in dress.
Then, again, we have the base disdain of color, of which I have
spoken at length elsewhere. Thus we have the lofty disdain of color,
as in Durer's and Raphael's drawing: finally, the severest and
passionate following of it, in Giorgione and Titian.
5. Color is, more than all elements of art, the reward of veracity of
purpose. This point respecting it I have not noticed before, and it
is highly curious. We have just seen that in giving an account of
anything for its own sake, the most important points are those of
form. Nevertheless, the form of the object is its own attribute;
special, not shared with other things. An error in giving an account
of it does not necessarily involve wider error.
But its color is partly its own, partly shared with other things
round it. The hue and power of all broad sunlight is involved in the
color it has cast upon this single thing; to falsify that color, is
to misrepresent and break the harmony of the day: also, by what color
it bears, this single object is altering hues all round it;
reflecting its own into them, displaying them by opposition,
softening them by repetition; one falsehood in color in one place,
implies a thousand in the neighborhood. Hence, there are peculiar
penalties attached to falsehood in color, and peculiar rewards
granted to veracity in it. Form may be attained in perfectness by
painters who, in their course of study, are continually altering or
idealizing it; but only the sternest fidelity will reach coloring.
Idealize or alter in that, and you are lost. Whether you alter by
abasing, or exaggerating,--by glare or by decline, one fate is for
you--ruin. Violate truth wilfully in the slightest particular, or, at
least, get into the habit of violating it, and all kinds of failure
and error will surround and haunt you to your fall.
Therefore, also, as long as you are working with form only, you may
amuse yourself with fancies; but color is sacred--in that you must
keep to facts. Hence the apparent anomaly that the only schools of
color are the schools of Realism. The men who care for form only, may
drift about in dreams of Spiritualism; but a colorist must keep to
substance. The greater his power in color enchantment, the more stern
and constant will be his common sense. Fuseli may wander wildly among
gray spectra, but Reynolds and Gainsborough must stay in broad
daylight, with pure humanity. Velasquez, the greatest colorist, is
the most accurate portrait painter of Spain; Holbein, the most
accurate portrait painter, is the only colorist of Germany; and even
Tintoret had to sacrifice some of the highest qualities of his color
before he could give way to the flights of wayward though mighty
imagination, in which his mind rises or declines from the royal calm
of Titian.
[4] Compare the deaths of Jehoram, Herod, and Judas.
[5] Thus, the railroad bridge over the Fall of Schaffhausen, and that
round the Clarens shore of the lake of Geneva, have destroyed the
power of two pieces of scenery of which nothing can ever supply the
place, in appeal to the higher ranks of European mind.
[6] "There are three things that are never satisfied, yea, four
things say not, it is enough: the grave; and the barren womb; the
earth that is not filled with water; and the fire, that saith not, It
is enough!"
[7] A bad word, being only "foresight" again in Latin; but we have no
other good English word for the sense into which it has been warped.
[8] I cannot repeat too often (for it seems almost impossible to
arouse the public mind in the least to a sense of the fact) that the
root of all benevolent and helpful action towards the lower classes
consists in the wise direction of purchase; that is to say, in
spending money, as far as possible, only for products of healthful
and natural labor. All work with fire is more or less harmful and
degrading; so also mine, or machine labor. They at present develope
more intelligence than rural labor, but this is only because no
education, properly so called, being given to the lower classes,
those occupations are best for them which compel them to attain some
accurate knowledge, discipline them in presence of mind, and bring
them within spheres in which they may raise themselves to positions
of command. Properly taught, a ploughman ought to be more
intelligent, as well as more healthy, than a miner.
Every nation which desires to ennoble itself should endeavor to
maintain as large a number of persons as possible by rural and
maritime labor (including fishing). I cannot in this place enter into
consideration of the relative advantages of different channels of
industry. Any one who sincerely desires to act upon such knowledge
will find no difficulty in obtaining it.
I have also several series of experiments and inquiries to undertake
before I shall be able to speak with security on certain points
connected with education; but I have no doubt that every child in a
civilized country should be taught the first principles of natural
history, physiology, and medicine; also to sing perfectly, so far as
it has capacity, and to draw any definite form accurately to any
scale.
These things it should be taught by requiring its attendance at
school not more than three hours a day, and less if possible (the
best part of children's education being in helping their parents and
families). The other elements of its instruction ought to have
respect to the trade by which it is to live.
Modern systems of improvement are too apt to confuse the recreation
of the workman with his education. He should be educated for his work
before he is allowed to undertake it; and refreshed and relieved
while he practises it.
Every effort should be made to induce the adoption of a national
costume. Cleanliness and neatness in dress ought always to be
rewarded by some gratification of personal pride; and it is the
peculiar virtue of a national costume that it fosters and gratifies
the wish to look well, without inducing the desire to look better
than one's neighbors--or the hope, peculiarly English, of being
mistaken for a person in a higher position of life. A costume may
indeed become coquettish, but rarely indecent or vulgar; and though a
French bonne or Swiss farm-girl may dress so as sufficiently to
mortify her equals, neither of them ever desires or expects to be
mistaken for her mistress.
[9] This last book should be read carefully by all persons interested
in social questions. It is sufficiently dull as a tale, but is
characterized throughout by a restrained tragic power of the highest
order; and it would be worth reading, were it only for the story of
Aenneli, and for the last half page of its close.
[10] "The Cumæan Sibyl, Deiphobe, was, in her youth, beloved by
Apollo; who, promising to grant her whatever she would ask, she took
up a handful of earth, and asked that she might live as many years as
there were grains of dust in her hand. She obtained her petition.
Apollo would have granted her perpetual youth in return for her love,
but she denied him, and wasted into the long ages--known, at last,
only by her voice."--(See my notes on the Turner Gallery.)
[11] Turner appears never to have desired, from any one, care in
favor of his separate works. The only thing he would say sometimes
was, "Keep them together." He seemed not to mind how much they were
injured, if only the record of the thought were left in them, and
they were kept in the series which would give the key to their
meaning. I never saw him, at my father's house, look for an instant
at any of his own drawings: I have watched him sitting at dinner
nearly opposite one of his chief pictures--his eyes never turned to
it.
But the want of appreciation, nevertheless, touched him sorely;
chiefly the not understanding his meaning. He tried hard one day for
a quarter of an hour to make me guess what he was doing in the
picture of Napoleon, before it had been exhibited, giving me hint
after hint in a rough way; but I could not guess, and he would not
tell me.
[12] I limit myself in this book to mere indication of the tones of
his mind, illustration of them at any length being as yet impossible.
It will be found on examining the series of drawings made by Turner
during the late years of his life, in possession of the nation, that
they are nearly all made for the sake of some record of human power,
partly victorious, partly conquered. There is hardly a single example
of landscape painted for its own abstract beauty. Power and
desolation, or soft pensiveness, are the elements sought chiefly in
landscape; hence the later sketches are nearly all among mountain
scenery, and chiefly of fortresses, villages or bridges and roads
among the wildest Alps. The pass of the St. Gothard, especially, from
his earliest days, had kept possession of his mind, not as a piece of
mountain scenery, but as a marvellous road; and the great drawing
which I have tried to illustrate with some care in this book, the
last he made of the Alps with unfailing energy, was wholly made to
show the surviving of this tormented path through avalanche and
storm, from the day when he first drew its two bridges, in the Liber
Studiorum. Plate 81, which is the piece of the torrent bed on the
left, of the real size, where the stones of it appear just on the
point of being swept away, and the ground we stand upon with them,
completes the series of illustrations of this subject, for the
present, sufficiently; and, if compared with Plate 80, will be
serviceable, also, in showing how various in its grasp and its
delight was this strange human mind, capable of all patience and all
energy, and perfect in its sympathy, whether with wrath or quietness.
Though lingering always with chief affection about the St. Gothard
pass, he seems to have gleaned the whole of Switzerland for every
record he could find of grand human effort of any kind; I do not
believe there is one baronial tower, one shattered arch of Alpine
bridge, one gleaming tower of decayed village or deserted monastery,
which he has not drawn; in many cases, round and round, again and
again, on every side. Now that I have done this work, I purpose, if
life and strength are spared to me, to trace him through these last
journeys, and take such record of his best-beloved places as may
fully interpret the designs he left. I have given in the three
following plates an example of the kind of work which needs doing,
and which, as stated in the preface, I have partly already begun.
Plate 82 represents roughly two of Turner's memoranda of a bridge
over the Rhine. They are quite imperfectly represented, because I do
not choose to take any trouble about them on this scale. If I can
engrave them at all, it must be of their own size; but they are
enough to give an idea of the way he used to walk round a place,
taking sketch after sketch of its aspects, from every point or
half-point of the compass. There are three other sketches of this
bridge, far more detailed than these, in the National Gallery.
A scratched word on the back of one of them, "Rheinfels," which I
knew could not apply to the Rheinfels near Bingen, gave me the clue
to the place;--an old Swiss town, seventeen miles above Basle,
celebrated in Swiss history as the main fortress defending the
frontier toward the Black Forest. I went there the moment I had got
Turner's sketches arranged in 1858, and drew it with the pen (or
point of brush, more difficult to manage, but a better instrument) on
every side on which Turner had drawn it, giving every detail with
servile accuracy, so as to show the exact modifications he made as he
composed his subjects. Mr. Le Keux has beautifully copied two of
these studies, Plates 83 and 84; the first of these is the bridge
drawn from the spot whence Turner made his upper memorandum;
afterwards, he went down close to the fishing house, and took the
second; in which he unhesitatingly divides the Rhine by a strong
pyramidal rock, in order to get a group of firm lines pointing to his
main subject, the tower (compare § 12, p. 170, above); and throws a
foaming mass of water away to the left, in order to give a better
idea of the river's force; the modifications of form in the tower
itself are all skilful and majestic in the highest degree. The
throwing the whole of it higher than the bridge, taking off the peak
from its gable on the left, and adding the little roof-window in the
centre, make it a perfectly noble mass, instead of a broken and
common one. I have added the other subject, Plate 84,--though I could
not give the Turner drawing which it illustrates,--merely to show the
kind of scene which modern ambition and folly are destroying
throughout Switzerland. In Plate 83, a small dark tower is seen in
the distance, just on the left of the tower of the bridge. Getting
round nearly to the foot of it, on the outside of the town, and then
turning back so as to put the town walls on your right, you may, I
hope, still see the subject of the third plate; the old bridge over
the moat, and older wall and towers; the stork's nest on the top of
the nearest one; the moat itself, now nearly filled with softest
grass and flowers; a little mountain brook rippling down through the
midst of them, and the first wooded promontory of the Jura beyond.
Had Rheinfelden been a place of the least mark, instead of a nearly
ruinous village, it is just this spot of ground which, costing little
or nothing, would have been made its railroad station, and its
refreshment-room would have been built out of the stones of the
towers.
[13] I have not followed out, as I ought to have done, had the task
been less painful, my assertion that Turner had to paint not only the
labor and the sorrow of men, but their death. There is no form of
violent death which he has not painted. Pre-eminent in many things,
he is pre-eminent also, bitterly, in this. Durer and Holbein drew the
skeleton in its questioning; but Turner, like Salvator, as under some
strange fascination or captivity, drew it at its work. Flood, and
fire, and wreck, and battle, and pestilence; and solitary death, more
fearful still. The noblest of all the plates of the Liber Studiorum,
except the Via Mala, is one engraved with his own hand, of a single
sailor, yet living, dashed in the night against a granite coast,--his
body and outstretched hands just seen in the trough of a mountain
wave, between it and the overhanging wall of rock, hollow, polished,
and pale with dreadful cloud and grasping foam.
And remember, also, that the very sign in heaven itself which, truly
understood, is the type of love, was to Turner the type of death. The
scarlet of the clouds was his symbol of destruction. In his mind it
was the color of blood. So he used it in the Fall of Carthage. Note
his own written words--
"While o'er the western wave the _ensanguined_ sun,
In gathering huge a stormy signal spread,
And set portentous."
So he used it in the Slaver, in the Ulysses, in the Napoleon, in the
Goldau; again and again in slighter hints and momentary dreams, of
which one of the saddest and most tender is a little sketch of dawn,
made in his last years. It is a small space of level sea shore;
beyond it a fair, soft light in the east; the last storm-clouds
melting away, oblique into the morning air; some little vessel--a
collier, probably--has gone down in the night, all hands lost; a
single dog has come ashore. Utterly exhausted, its limbs failing
under it, and, sinking into the sand, it stands howling and
shivering. The dawn-clouds have the first scarlet upon them, a feeble
tinge only, reflected with the same feeble blood-stain on the sand.
The morning light is used with a loftier significance in a drawing
made as a companion to the Goldau, engraved in the fourth volume. The
Lake of Zug, which ripples beneath the sunset in the Goldau, is
lulled in the level azure of early cloud; and the spire of Aart,
which is there a dark point at the edge of the golden lake, is, in
the opening light, seen pale against purple mountains. The sketches
for these two subjects were, I doubt not, made from the actual
effects of a stormy evening, and the next following daybreak; but
both with earnest meaning. The crimson sunset lights the valley of
rock tombs, cast upon it by the fallen Rossberg; but the sunrise
gilds with its level rays the two peaks which protect the village
that gives name to Switzerland; and the orb itself breaks first
through the darkness on the very point of the pass to the high lake
of Egeri, where the liberties of the cantons were won by the
battle-charge of Morgarten.
[14] I have engraved, at the beginning of this chapter, one of the
fragments of these frescos, preserved, all imperfectly indeed, yet
with some feeling of their nobleness, by Zanetti, whose words
respecting them I have quoted in the text. The one I saw was the
first figure given in his book; the one engraved in my Plate, the
third, had wholly perished; but even this record of it by Zanetti is
precious. What imperfections of form exist in it, too visibly, are
certainly less Giorgione's than the translator's; nevertheless, for
these very faults, as well as for its beauty, I have chosen it, as
the best type I could give of the strength of Venetian art; which was
derived, be it remembered always, from the acceptance of natural
truth, by men who loved beauty too well to think she was to be won by
falsehood.
The words of Zanetti himself respecting Giorgione's figure of
Diligence are of great value, as they mark this first article of
Venetian faith: "Giorgione per tale, o per altra che vi fosse,
contrassegnolla con quella spezie di mannaja che tiene in mano; per
altro tanto ci cercava le sole bellezze della natura, che poco
pensando al costume, ritrasse qui una di quelle donne Friulane, che
vengono per servire in Venezia; non alterandone nemmeno l'abito, è
facendola alquanto attempata, quale forse ci la vedea; senza voler
sapere che per rappresentare le Virtù, si suole da pittori belle è
fresche giovani immaginare."
Compare with this what I have said of Titian's Magdalen. I ought in
that place to have dwelt also upon the firm endurance of all
terribleness which is marked in Titian's "Notomie" and in Veronese's
"Marsyas." In order to understand the Venetian mind entirely, the
student should place a plate from that series of the Notomie always
beside the best engraving he can obtain of Titian's "Flora."
My impression is that the ground of the flesh in these Giorgione
frescos had been pure vermilion; little else was left in the figure I
saw. Therefore, not knowing what power the painter intended to
personify by the figure at the commencement of this chapter, I have
called her, from her glowing color, Hesperid Æglé.