DELAPINE MAKES AN EXPERIMENT IN BOTANY
Delapine and Villebois left the room arm in arm, and entered the library where they found Riche idly glancing over a magazine, and at the same time quietly smoking his pipe.
"Hullo, Riche," called out Villebois in his usual cheery tones. "What have you been doing with yourself for the last hour?"
"Well, as a matter of fact, I have been amusing myself looking through your charming work on Turner's paintings illustrated in colour. Ah, Turner was a great artist, a very great artist," said Riche. "He was to England what our Claude Lorraine was to France. Between them they succeeded in teaching the world the true art of landscape painting. Until their time the Dutch and Flemish schools alone had attained a moderate degree of success, but when all is said and done Dutch and Flemish pictures were in the main—that is, in the majority of cases—merely cold, flat, and very conventional. But with the advent of Turner, a great change came over art. He not only copied Nature, but he improved on it, idealised it, and gave it life, warmth, breadth, and depth, such as only Claude before him could conceive. Ma parole, were I not a Frenchman, I would place him in the world of painters absolutely alone in his glory."
"Right again, Riche, as usual," said Delapine, much interested. "It is a pleasure to hear Turner praised and appreciated. Not so very long ago it was the fashion to decry him, but all the disparagement could not gainsay the revolution he caused in art."
"Look," continued Riche, encouraged in one of his pet hobbies to find so sympathetic an enthusiast in Delapine—the man of science and psychic phenomena, "look at the picture of Dido building Carthage. See the towering marble buildings on either side like fairy castles in the air. Look how every figure, every object is so cunningly painted that collectively they form graceful curves which insensibly lead the eye to the 'point d'apui', which in this case, as you will notice, is the setting sun in the infinite distance beyond, giving immense depth and plasticity to the scene. Look again at his picture of Venice. Here we have a city of pink, and gold, and white, rising like a mist out of an emerald sea under a dome of sapphire blue. What a vista of exquisitely tender loveliness. How beautifully, and yet almost impossibly real. Compare it with the Venice of Canaletti—the same buildings, the same Grand Canal, and yet how vast the gulf between the two painters. Turner's may be likened to a poetic dream; the other, well—the other is merely conventional prose. Take again his 'Ulysses deriding Polyphemus.' Look at the huge rugged rocks frowning over the sea, and the half-hidden giant heaving a large boulder at the Grecian galley. Note the defiant look of Ulysses as he waves a blazing olive tree, while his men are climbing the rigging to unfurl the sails. See the skilful outlining of the shadowy horses of Phoebus in the slanting rays of the rising sun. Could anything tell a tale better? What conception! what genius! it is the power of imagination over the stern reality of facts."
"Yes, you have seized the keynote of his genius," said Villebois, admiring his friend's enthusiasm. "But in my humble opinion his 'Fighting Temeraire' being towed to her last resting place by the fiery little steamtug is the finest picture of them all."
"By the way, what has become of Delapine? I wanted him to have a glass of wine or some coffee with us in the summer-house, let us go and look for him."