The highest service, however, that Art can accomplish for man is to become "at once the voice of his nobler aspirations, and the steady disciplinarian of his emotions; and it is with this mission, rather than with any aesthetic perfection, that we are at present concerned." [4]
Science and Art are sisters, or rather perhaps they are like brother and sister. The mission of Art is in some respects like that of woman. It is not Hers so much to do the hard toil and moil of the world, as to surround it with a halo of beauty, to convert work into pleasure.
In science we naturally expect progress, but in Art the case is not so clear; and yet Sir Joshua Reynolds did not hesitate to express his conviction that in the future "so much will painting improve, that the best we can now achieve will appear like the work of children," and we may hope that our power of enjoying it may increase in an equal ratio. Wordsworth says that poets have to create the taste for their own works, and the same is, in some degree at any rate, true of artists.
In one respect especially modern painters appear to have made a marked advance, and one great blessing which in fact we owe to them is a more vivid enjoyment of scenery.
I have of course no pretensions to speak with authority, but even in the case of the greatest masters before Turner, the landscapes seem to me singularly inferior to the figures. Sir Joshua Reynolds tells us that Gainsborough framed a kind of model of a landscape on his table, composed of broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking-glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water; and Sir Joshua solemnly discusses the wisdom of such a proceeding. "How far it may be useful in giving hints," he says, "the professors of landscape can best determine," but he does not recommend it, and is disposed to think, on the whole, the practice may be more likely to do harm than good!
In the picture of Ceyx and Alcyone, by Wilson, of whom Cunningham said that, with Gainsborough, he laid the foundation of our School of Landscape, the castle is said to have been painted from a pot of porter, and the rock from a Stilton cheese. There is indeed another version of the story, that the picture was sold for a pot of porter and a cheese, which, however, does not give a higher idea of the appreciation of the art of landscape at that date.
Until very recently the general feeling with reference to mountain scenery has been that expressed by Tacitus. "Who would leave Asia or Africa or Italy to go to Germany, a shapeless and unformed country, a harsh sky, and melancholy aspect, unless indeed it was his native land?"
It is amusing to read the opinion of Dr. Beattie, in a special treatise on Truth, Poetry and Music, written at the close of the last century, that "The Highlands of Scotland are in general a melancholy country. Long tracts of mountainous country, covered with dark heath, and often obscured by misty weather; narrow valleys thinly inhabited, and bounded by precipices resounding with the fall of torrents; a soil so rugged, and a climate so dreary, as in many parts to admit neither the amenities of pasturage, nor the labors of agriculture; the mournful dashing of waves along the firths and lakes: the portentous noises which every change of the wind is apt to raise in a lonely region, full of echoes, and rocks, and caverns; the grotesque and ghastly appearance of such a landscape by the light of the moon: objects like these diffuse a gloom over the fancy," etc. [5]
Even Goldsmith regarded the scenery of the Highlands as dismal and hideous. Johnson, we know, laid it down as an axiom that "the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England"—a saying which throws much doubt on his distinction that the Giant's Causeway was "worth seeing but not worth going to see." [6]
Madame de Staël declared, that though she would go 500 leagues to meet a clever man, she would not care to open her window to see the Bay of Naples.