APPENDIX TO THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS.
SECTION I.
NATURE OF THE PICTURESQUE.[17]
In landscape, the nature of the beautiful and the sublime seems to be better understood than that of the picturesque. There are few disputes as to the former; many as to the latter. These disputes, moreover, are not as to what is picturesque, but as to what picturesque is.
Payne Knight asserts, that the picturesque has no distinctive character, and merely designates what a painter would imitate. Price, on the contrary, has given so many admirable illustrations of it, that its characteristics are before every reader. Strange to tell, its nature or essence has not been penetrated, because these characteristics have not been rigidly analyzed.
Price has, indeed, generalized considerably on this subject, by showing that irregularity, roughness, &c., enter into all scenes of a picturesque description; and the examination of any one of them will certainly verify the truth of his observation.
Thus, on a remote country-road, we often observe the deep ruts on its surface which in winter would render it impassable—the huge and loose moss-grown stone, ready to encumber it by falling from the bank—the stunted pollard by its side, whose roots are exposed by the earth falling away from it, and which must itself be swept away by the first wind that may blow against it in an unfavorable direction—the almost ruined cottage, above and beyond these, whose gable is propped up by an old and broken wheel, and whose thatched roof, stained with every hue of moss or lichen, has, at one part, long fallen in—the shaggy and ragged horse that browses among the rank weeds around it—and the old man, bent with age, who leans over the broken gate in front of it.
Here, in every circumstance, is verified the irregularity and roughness which Price ascribes to the picturesque. But he has failed to observe, that the irregularity and roughness are but the signs of that which interests the mind far more deeply, namely, the universal DECAY which causes them. This is the essence of the picturesque—the charm in it which begets our sympathy.
Confining his remark merely to ruins, the author of “Observations on Gardening,” says: “At the sight of a ruin, reflections on the change, the decay, and the desolation, before us naturally occur; and they introduce a long succession of others, all tinctured with that melancholy which these have inspired; or if the monument revive the memory of former times, we do not stop at the simple fact which it records, but recollect many more coeval circumstances which we see, nor perhaps as they were, but as they are come down to us, venerable with age, and magnified by fame.”—What is here said of ruins, and is indeed as to them sufficiently striking, is true of the picturesque universally, and it is only surprising that, amid such disputes, this simple and obvious truth should not have been observed.