And thus, all that landscape of the old masters is to be considered merely as a struggle of expiring skill to discover some new direction in which to display itself. There was no love of nature in the age; only a desire for something new. Therefore those schools expired at last, leaving the chasm of nearly utter emptiness between them and the true moderns, out of which chasm the new school rises, not engrafted on that old one, but, from the very base of all things, beginning with mere washes of Indian ink, touched upon with yellow and brown; and gradually feeling its way to color.
But this infant school differed inherently from that ancienter one, in that its motive was love. However feeble its efforts might be, they were for the sake of the nature, not of the picture, and therefore, having this germ of true life, it grew and throve. Robson did not paint purple hills because he wanted to show how he could lay on purple; but because he truly loved their dark peaks. Fielding did not paint downs to show how dexterously he could sponge out mists; but because he loved downs.
This modern school, therefore, became the only true school of landscape which had yet existed; the artificial Claude and Gaspar work may be cast aside out of our way,—as I have said in my Edinburgh lectures, under the general title of "pastoralism,"—and from the last landscape of Tintoret, if we look for life, we must pass at once to the first of Turner.
§ 32. What help Turner received from this or that companion of his youth is of no importance to any one now. Of course every great man is always being helped by everybody,[103] for his gift is to get good out of all things and all persons; and also there were two men associated with him in early study, who showed high promise in the same field, Cousen and Girtin (especially the former), and there is no saying what these men might have done had they lived; there might, perhaps, have been a struggle between one or other of them and Turner, as between Giorgione and Titian. But they lived not; and Turner is the only great man whom the school has yet produced,—quite great enough, as we shall see, for all that needed to be done. To him, therefore, we now finally turn, as the sole object of our inquiry. I shall first reinforce, with such additions as they need, those statements of his general principles which I made in the first volume, but could not then demonstrate fully, for want of time to prepare pictorial illustration; and then proceed to examine, piece by piece, his representations of the facts of nature, comparing them, as it may seem expedient, with what had been accomplished by others.
I cannot close this volume without alluding briefly to a subject of different interest from any that have occupied us in its pages. For it may, perhaps, seem to a general reader heartless and vain to enter zealously into questions about our arts and pleasures in a time of so great public anxiety as this.
But he will find, if he looks back to the sixth paragraph of the opening chapter of the last volume, some statement of feelings, which, as they made me despondent in a time of apparent national prosperity, now cheer me in one which, though of stern trial, I will not be so much a coward as to call one of adversity. And I derive this encouragement first from the belief that the War itself, with all its bitterness, is, in the present state of the European nations, productive of more good than evil; and, secondly, because I have more confidence than others generally entertain, in the justice of its cause.
I say, first, because I believe the war is at present productive of good more than of evil. I will not argue this hardly and coldly, as I might, by tracing in past history some of the abundant evidence that nations have always reached their highest virtue, and wrought their most accomplished works, in times of straitening and battle; as, on the other hand, no nation ever yet enjoyed a protracted and triumphant peace without receiving in its own bosom ineradicable seeds of future decline. I will not so argue this matter; but I will appeal at once to the testimony of those whom the war has cost the dearest. I know what would be told me, by those who have suffered nothing; whose domestic happiness has been unbroken; whose daily comfort undisturbed; whose experience of calamity consists, at its utmost, in the incertitude of a speculation, the dearness of a luxury, or the increase of demands upon their fortune which they could meet fourfold without inconvenience. From these, I can well believe, be they prudent economists, or careless pleasure-seekers, the cry for peace will rise alike vociferously, whether in street or senate. But I ask their witness, to whom the war has changed the aspect of the earth, and imagery of heaven, whose hopes it has cut off like a spider's web, whose treasure it has placed, in a moment, under the seals of clay. Those who can never more see sunrise, nor watch the climbing light gild the Eastern clouds, without thinking what graves it has gilded, first, far down behind the dark earth-line,—who never more shall see the crocus bloom in spring, without thinking what dust it is that feeds the wild flowers of Balaclava. Ask their witness, and see if they will not reply that it is well with them, and with theirs; that they would have it no otherwise; would not, if they might, receive back their gifts of love and life, nor take again the purple of their blood out of the cross on the breastplate of England. Ask them: and though they should answer only with a sob, listen if it does not gather upon their lips into the sound of the old Seyton war-cry—"Set on."
And this not for pride—not because the names of their lost ones will be recorded to all time, as of those who held the breach and kept the gate of Europe against the North, as the Spartans did against the East; and lay down in the place they had to guard, with the like home message, "Oh, stranger, go and tell the English that we are lying here, having obeyed their words;"—not for this, but because, also, they have felt that the spirit which has discerned them for eminence in sorrow—the helmed and sworded skeleton that rakes with its white fingers the sands of the Black Sea beach into grave-heap after grave-heap, washed by everlasting surf of tears—has been to them an angel of other things than agony; that they have learned, with those hollow, undeceivable eyes of his, to see all the earth by the sunlight of deathbeds;—no inch-high stage for foolish griefs and feigned pleasures; no dream, neither, as its dull moralists told them;—Anything but that: a place of true, marvellous, inextricable sorrow and power; a question-chamber of trial by rack and fire, irrevocable decision recording continually; and no sleep, nor folding of hands, among the demon-questioners; none among the angel-watchers, none among the men who stand or fall beside those hosts of God. They know now the strength of sacrifice, and that its flames can illumine as well as consume; they are bound by new fidelities to all that they have saved,—by new love to all for whom they have suffered; every affection which seemed to sink with those dim life-stains into the dust, has been delegated, by those who need it no more, to the cause for which they have expired; and every mouldering arm, which will never more embrace the beloved ones, has bequeathed to them its strength and its faithfulness.
For the cause of this quarrel is no dim, half-avoidable involution of mean interests and errors, as some would have us believe. There never was a great war caused by such things. There never can be. The historian may trace it, with ingenious trifling, to a courtier's jest or a woman's glance; but he does not ask—(and it is the sum of questions)—how the warring nations had come to found their destinies on the course of the sneer, or the smile. If they have so based them, it is time for them to learn, through suffering, how to build on other foundations—for great, accumulated, and most righteous cause, their foot slides in due time; and against the torpor, or the turpitude, of their myriads, there is loosed the haste of the devouring sword and the thirsty arrow. But if they have set their fortunes on other than such ground, then the war must be owing to some deep conviction or passion in their own hearts,—a conviction which, in resistless flow, or reckless ebb, or consistent stay, is the ultimate arbiter of battle, disgrace, or conquest.