§ 6. But more than this: the fact is that in multitudes of instances, instead of gaining greater fineness of finish by our work, we are only destroying the fine finish of nature, and substituting coarseness and imperfection. For instance, when a rock of any kind has lain for some time exposed to the weather, Nature finishes it in her own way; first, she takes wonderful pains about its forms, sculpturing it into exquisite variety of dint and dimple, and rounding or hollowing it into contours, which for fineness no human hand can follow; then she colors it; and every one of her touches of color, instead of being a powder mixed with oil, is a minute forest of living trees, glorious in strength and beauty, and concealing wonders of structure, which in all probability are mysteries even to the eyes of angels. Man comes and digs up this finished and marvellous piece of work, which in his ignorance he calls a "rough stone." He proceeds to finish it in his fashion, that is, to split it in two, rend it into ragged blocks, and, finally, to chisel its surface into a large number of lumps and knobs, all equally shapeless, colorless, deathful, and frightful.[39] And the block, thus disfigured, he calls "finished," and proceeds to build therewith, and thinks himself great, forsooth, and an intelligent animal. Whereas, all that he has really done is, to destroy with utter ravage a piece of divine art, which, under the laws appointed by the Deity to regulate his work in this world, it must take good twenty years to produce the like of again. This he has destroyed, and has himself given in its place a piece of work which needs no more intelligence to do than a pholas has, or a worm, or the spirit which throughout the world has authority over rending, rottenness, and decay. I do not say that stone must not be cut; it needs to be cut for certain uses; only I say that the cutting it is not "finishing," but unfinishing it; and that so far as the mere fact of chiselling goes, the stone is ruined by the human touch. It is with it as with the stones of the Jewish altar: "If thou lift up thy tool upon it thou hast polluted it." In like manner a tree is a finished thing. But a plank, though ever so polished, is not. We need stones and planks, as we need food; but we no more bestow an additional admirableness upon stone in hewing it, or upon a tree in sawing it, than upon an animal in killing it.
§ 7. Well, but it will be said, there is certainly a kind of finish in stone-cutting, and in every other art, which is meritorious, and which consists in smoothing and refining as much as possible. Yes, assuredly there is a meritorious finish. First, as it has just been said, that which fits a thing for its uses,—as a stone to lie well in its place, or the cog of an engine wheel to play well on another; and, secondly, a finish belonging properly to the arts; but that finish does not consist in smoothing or polishing, but in the completeness of the expression of ideas. For in painting, there is precisely the same difference between the ends proposed in finishing that there is in manufacture. Some artists finish for the finish' sake; dot their pictures all over, as in some kinds of miniature-painting (when a wash of color would have produced as good an effect); or polish their pictures all over, making the execution so delicate that the touch of the brush cannot be seen, for the sake of the smoothness merely, and of the credit they may thus get for great labor; which kind of execution, seen in great perfection in many works of the Dutch school, and in those of Carlo Dolce, is that polished "language" against which I have spoken at length in various portions of the first volume; nor is it possible to speak of it with too great severity or contempt, where it has been made an ultimate end.
But other artists finish for the impression's sake, not to show their skill, nor to produce a smooth piece of work, but that they may, with each stroke, render clearer the expression of knowledge. And this sort of finish is not, properly speaking, so much completing the picture as adding to it. It is not that what is painted is more delicately done, but that infinitely more is painted. This finish is always noble, and, like all other noblest things, hardly ever understood or appreciated. I must here endeavor, more especially with respect to the state of quarrel between the schools of living painters, to illustrate it thoroughly.
§ 8. In sketching the outline, suppose of the trunk of a tree, as in Plate 2. (opposite) fig. 1., it matters comparatively little whether the outline be given with a bold, or delicate line, so long as it is outline only. The work is not more "finished" in one case than in the other; it is only prepared for being seen at a greater or less distance. The real refinement or finish of the line depends, not on its thinness, but on its truly following the contours of the tree, which it conventionally represents; conventionally, I say, because there is no such line round the tree, in reality; and it is set down not as an imitation, but a limitation of the form. But if we are to add shade to it as in fig. 2., the outline must instantly be made proportionally delicate, not for the sake of delicacy as such, but because the outline will now, in many parts, stand not for limitation of form merely, but for a portion of the shadow within that form. Now, as a limitation it was true, but as a shadow it would be false, for there is no line of black shadow at the edge of the stem. It must, therefore, be made so delicate as not to detach itself from the rest of the shadow where shadow exists, and only to be seen in the light where limitation is still necessary.
Observe, then, the "finish" of fig. 2. as compared with fig. 1. consists, not in its greater delicacy, but in the addition of a truth (shadow), a removal, in a great degree, of a conventionalism (outline). All true finish consists in one or other of these things. Now, therefore, if we are to "finish" farther we must know more or see more about the tree. And as the plurality of persons who draw trees know nothing of them, and will not look at them, it results necessarily that the effort to finish is not only vain, but unfinishes—does mischief. In the lower part of the plate, figs. 3, 4, 5, and 6. are facsimiles of pieces of line engraving, meant to represent trunks of trees; 3. and 4. are the commonly accredited types of tree-drawing among engravers in the eighteenth century; 5. and 6. are quite modern; 3. is from a large and important plate by Boydell, from Claude's Molten Calf, dated 1781; 4. by Boydell in 1776, from Rubens's Waggoner; 5. from a bombastic engraving, published about twenty years ago by Meulemeester of Brussels, from Raphael's Moses at the Burning Bush; and 6. from the foreground of Miller's Modern Italy, after Turner.[40]
All these represent, as far as the engraving goes, simply nothing. They are not "finished" in any sense but this,—that the paper has been covered with lines. 4. is the best, because, in the original work of Rubens, the lines of the boughs, and their manner of insertion in the trunk, have been so strongly marked, that no engraving could quite efface them; and, inasmuch as it represents these facts in the boughs, that piece of engraving is more finished than the other examples, while its own networked texture is still false and absurd; for there is no texture of this knitted-stocking-like description on boughs; and if there were, it would not be seen in the shadow, but in the light. Miller's is spirited, and looks lustrous, but has no resemblance to the original bough of Turner's, which is pale, and does not glitter. The Netherlands work is, on the whole, the worst; because, in its ridiculous double lines, it adds affectation and conceit to its incapacity. But in all these cases the engravers have worked in total ignorance both of what is meant by "drawing," and of the form of a tree, covering their paper with certain lines, which they have been taught to plough in copper, as a husbandman ploughs in clay.
§ 9. In the next three examples we have instances of endeavors at finish by the hands of artists themselves, marking three stages of knowledge or insight, and three relative stages of finish. Fig. 7. is Claude's (Liber Veritatis, No. 140., facsimile by Boydell). It still displays an appalling ignorance of the forms of trees, but yet is, in mode of execution, better—that is, more finished—than the engravings, because not altogether mechanical, and showing some dim, far-away, blundering memory of a few facts in stems, such as their variations of texture and roundness, and bits of young shoots of leaves. 8. is Salvator's, facsimiled from part of his original etching of the Finding of Œdipus. It displays considerable power of handling—not mechanical, but free and firm, and is just so much more finished than any of the others as it displays more intelligence about the way in which boughs gather themselves out of the stem, and about the varying character of their curves. Finally, fig. 9. is good work. It is the root of the apple-tree in Albert Durer's Adam and Eve, and fairly represents the wrinkles of the bark, the smooth portions emergent beneath, and the general anatomy of growth. All the lines used conduce to the representation of these facts; and the work is therefore highly finished. It still, however, leaves out, as not to be represented by such kind of lines, the more delicate gradations of light and shade. I shall now "finish" a little farther, in the next plate (3.), the mere insertion of the two boughs outlined in fig. 1. I do this simply by adding assertions of more facts. First, I say that the whole trunk is dark, as compared with the distant sky. Secondly, I say that it is rounded by gradations of shadow, in the various forms shown. And, lastly, I say that (this being a bit of old pine stripped by storm of its bark) the wood is fissured in certain directions, showing its grain, or muscle, seen in complicated contortions at the insertion of the arm and elsewhere.
§ 10. Now this piece of work, though yet far from complete (we will better it presently), is yet more finished than any of the others, not because it is more delicate or more skilful, but simply because it tells more truth, and admits fewer fallacies. That which conveys most information, with least inaccuracy, is always the highest finish; and the question whether we prefer art so finished, to art unfinished, is not one of taste at all. It is simply a question whether we like to know much or little; to see accurately or see falsely; and those whose taste in art (if they choose so to call it) leads them to like blindness better than sight, and fallacy better than fact, would do well to set themselves to some other pursuit than that of art.