I have always had a fancy for double-hulled boats (now generally called catamarans), and had two of them on Loch Awe. This eccentricity was perhaps fortunate, as my boats were extremely safe, each hull being decked from stem to stern and divided internally into water-tight compartments. They could therefore ship a sea with perfect impunity, and although often exposed to sudden and violent squalls, we were never in any real danger. One of my catamarans would beat to windward tolerably well, but she did not tack quickly, and occasionally missed stays. However, these defects were of slight importance in a boat not intended for racing, and small enough to be always quite manageable with oars. Since those days I have much improved the construction of catamarans, so that their evolutions are now quicker and more certain. They are absolutely the only sailing-boats that combine lightness with safety and speed.
As to the practice of landscape-painting, I very soon found that the West Highlands were not favorable to painting from nature on account of the rapid changes of effect. Those changes are so revolutionary that they often metamorphose all the oppositions in a natural picture in the course of a single minute. I began by planting my hut on the island called Inishail, in the middle of Loch Awe, with the intention of painting Ben Cruachan from nature, but soon discovered that there were fifty Cruachans a day, each effacing its predecessor, so my picture got on badly. If I painted what was before me, the result was like playing successfully a bar or two from each of several different musical compositions in the vain hope of harmonizing them into one. If I tried to paint my first impression, it became increasingly difficult to do that when the mountain itself presented novel and striking aspects.
Every artist who reads this will now consider the above remarks no better than a commonplace, but in the year 1857 English landscape-painting was going through a peculiar phase. There was, in some of the younger artists, a feeling of dissatisfaction with the slight and superficial work too often produced from hasty water-color sketches, and there was an honest desire for more substantial truth coupled with the hope of attaining it by working directly from nature. My critical master, Mr. Ruskin, saw in working from nature the only hope for the regeneration of art, and my practical master, Mr. Pettitt, considered it the height of artistic virtue to sit down before nature and work on the details of a large picture for eight or ten weeks together. I was eagerly anxious to do what was considered most right, and quite willing to undergo any degree of inconvenience. The truth is, perhaps, that (like other devotees) I rather enjoyed the sacrifice of convenience for what seemed to me, at that time, the sacred cause of veracity in art.
The Highlands of Scotland were intensely attractive to me, as being a kind of sublimation of the wild northern landscape that I had already loved in my native Lancashire; but the Highlands were not well chosen as a field for self-improvement in the art of painting. A student ought not to choose the most changeful of landscapes, but the least changeful; not the Highlands or the English Lake District, but the dullest landscape he can find in the south or the east of England. Norfolk would have been a better country for me, as a student, than Argyllshire. If, however, any prudent adviser had told me to go to dull scenery in those days, it would have been like telling a passionate lover of great capitals to go and live in a narrow little provincial town. I hated dull, unromantic scenery, and at the same time had the passion for mountains, lakes, wild moorland, and everything that was rough and uncultivated,—a passion so predominant that it resembled rather the natural instinct of an animal for its own habitat than the choice of a reasonable being. I loved everything in the Highlands, even the bad weather; I delighted in clouds and storms, and have never experienced any natural influences more in harmony with the inmost feelings of my own nature than those of a great lake's dark waters when they dashed in spray on the rocks of some lonely islet and my boat flew past in the gray and dreary gloaming.
"Le paysage," says a French critic, "est un état d'âme." He meant that what we seek in nature is that which answers to the state of our own souls. What is called dreary, wild, and melancholy scenery afforded me, at that time, a kind of satisfaction more profound than that which is given by any of the human arts. I loved painting, but all the collections in Europe attracted me less than the barren northern end of our own island, in which there are no pictures; I loved architecture, and chose a country that is utterly destitute of it; I delighted in music, and pitched my tent where there was no music but that of the winds and the waves.
The Loch Awe of those days was not the Loch Awe of the present. There was no railway; there was not a steamer on the lake, either public or private; there was no hotel by the waterside, only one or two small inns, imperceptible in the vastness of the almost uninhabited landscape. The lake was therefore almost a solitude, and this, added to the wildness of the climate and the peculiarly simple and temporary character of my habitation, made nature much more profoundly impressive than it ever is amidst the powerful rivalry of the works of man. The effect on my mind was, on the whole, saddening, but not in the least depressing. It was a kind of poetic sadness that had nothing to do with low spirits. I have never been either merry or melancholy, but have kept an equable cheerfulness that maintains itself serenely enough even in solitude and amidst the desolate aspects of stony and barren lands. As life advances, it is wise, however, to seek the more cheering influences of the external world, and those are rather to be found in the brightest and sunniest landscape, with abundant evidence of happy human habitation; some southern land of the vine where the chestnut grows high on the hills, and the peach and the pear ripen richly in innumerable gardens.
CHAPTER XXXI.
1857-1858.
Small immediate results of the expedition to the Highlands.—Unsuitable system of work.—Loss of time.—I rent the house and island of Innistrynich.—My dread of marriage and the reasons for it.—Notwithstanding this I make an offer and am refused.—Two young ladies of my acquaintance.—Idea of a foreign marriage.—Its inconveniences.—Decision to ask for the hand of Mdlle. Gindriez.—I go to Paris and am accepted.—Elective affinities.
The immediate artistic results of the expedition to the Highlands were very small. I had gone there to paint detailed work from nature, when I ought to have gone to sketch, and so adapt my work to the peculiar character of the climate.