§ 11. In the above plate we have examined chiefly the grain and surface of the boughs; we have not yet noticed the finish of their curvature. If the reader will look back to the No. 7. (Plate 2.), which, in this respect, is the worst of all the set, he will immediately observe the exemplification it gives of Claude's principal theory about trees; namely, that the boughs always parted from each other, two at a time, in the manner of the prongs of an ill-made table-fork. It may, perhaps, not be at once believed that this is indeed Claude's theory respecting tree-structure, without some farther examples of his practice. I have, therefore, assembled on the next page, Plate 4., some of the most characteristic passages of ramification in the Liber Veritatis; the plates themselves are sufficiently cheap (as they should be) and accessible to nearly every one, so that the accuracy of the facsimiles may be easily tested. I have given in Appendix I. the numbers of the plates from which the examples are taken, and it will be found that they have been rather improved than libelled, only omitting, of course, the surrounding leafage, in order to show accurately the branch-outlines, with which alone we are at present concerned. And it would be difficult to bring together a series more totally futile and foolish, more singularly wrong (as the false griffin was), every way at once; they are stiff, and yet have no strength; curved, and yet have no flexibility; monotonous, and yet disorderly; unnatural, and yet uninventive. They are, in fact, of that commonest kind of tree bough which a child or beginner first draws experimentally; nay, I am well assured, that if this set of branches had been drawn by a schoolboy, "out of his own head," his master would hardly have cared to show them as signs of any promise in him.
§ 12. "Well, but do not the trunks of trees fork, and fork mostly into two arms at a time?"
Fig. 2.
Yes; but under as stern anatomical law as the limbs of an animal; and those hooked junctions in Plate 4. are just as accurately representative of the branching of wood as this (fig. 2.) is of a neck and shoulders. We should object to such a representation of shoulders, because we have some interest in, and knowledge of, human form; we do not object to Claude's trees, because we have no interest in, nor knowledge of, trees. And if it be still alleged that such work is nevertheless enough to give any one an "idea" of a tree, I answer that it never gave, nor ever will give, an idea of a tree to any one who loves trees; and that, moreover, no idea, whatever its pleasantness, is of the smallest value, which is not founded on simple facts. What pleasantness may be in wrong ideas we do not here inquire; the only question for us has always been, and must always be, What are the facts?