saith Dyer, in his landscape of "Grongar Hill." The "glare-seekers" is curious enough, when we remember the graduate's description of landscapes, (of course Turner's,) and his excursions; but we think we have seen many purples in Turner, and that opposed to his flaming red in sunsets. He prefers warmth where most people feel cold—this is not surprising; but as to picture "is it true?" "My own feelings would guide me rather to the warm greys of such pictures as the 'Snow-Storm,' or the glowing scarlet and gold of the 'Napoleon' and the 'Slave Ship.'" The two latter must be well remembered by all Exhibition visitors; they were the strangest things imaginable in colour as in every particle that should be art or nature. There is a whimsical quotation from Wordsworth, the "keenest-eyed," page 145. His object is to show the strength of shadow—how "the shadows on the trunk of the tree become darker and more conspicuous than any part of the boughs or limbs;" so, for this strength and blackness, we have—
"At the root
Of that tall pine, the shadow of whose bare
And slender stem, while here I sit at eve,
Oft stretches tow'rds me, like a long straight path,
Traced faintly in the greensward."
"Of the truth of space," he says that "in a real landscape, we can see the whole of what would be called the middle distance and distance together, with facility and clearness; but while we do so, we can see nothing in the foreground beyond a vague and indistinct arrangement of lines and colours; and that if, on the contrary, we look at any foreground object, so as to receive a distinct impression of it, the distance and middle distance become all disorder and mystery. And therefore, if in a painting our foreground is any thing, our distance must be nothing, and vice versa." "Now, to this fact and principle, no landscape painter of the old school, as far as I remember, ever paid the slightest attention. Finishing their foregrounds clearly and sharply, and with vigorous impression on the eye, giving even the leaves of their bushes and grass with perfect edge and shape, they proceeded into the distance with equal attention to what they could see of its details," &c. But he had blamed Claude for not having given the exactness and distinct shape and colour of leaves in foreground. The fact is, the picture should be as a piece of nature framed in. Within that frame, we should not see distinctly the foreground and distance at the same instant: but, as we have stated, the eye and mind are rapid, the one to see, the other to combine; and as a horse let loose into a field, runs to the extremity of it and around it, the first thing he does—so do we range over every part of the picture, but with wondrous rapidity, before our impression of the whole is perfect. We must not, therefore, slur over any thing; the difficulty in art is to give the necessary, and so made necessary, detail of foreground unostentatiously—to paint nothing, that which is to tell as nothing, but so as it shall satisfy upon examination; and we think so the old masters did paint the foregrounds, particularly Gaspar Poussin—so Titian, so Domenichino, and all of any merit. But this is merely an introduction, not to a palliation of, but the approbation and praise of a glaring defect in Turner. "Turner introduced a new era in landscape art, by showing that the foreground might be sunk for the distance, and that it was possible to express immediate proximity to the spectator, without giving any thing like completeness to the forms of the near objects." We are now, therefore, prepared for an absurd "justification of the want of drawing in Turner's figures," thus contemptuously, with regard to all but himself, accounted for. "And now we see the reason for the singular, and, to the ignorant in art, the offensive execution of Turner's figures. I do not mean to assert that there is any reason whatsoever for bad drawing, (though in landscape it matters exceedingly little;) but there is both reason and necessity for that want of drawing which gives even the nearest figures round balls with four pink spots in them instead of faces, and four dashes of the brush instead of hands and feet; for it is totally impossible that if the eye be adapted to receive the rays proceeding from the utmost distance, and some partial impression from all the distances, it should be capable of perceiving more of the forms and features of near figures than Turner gives." Yet what wonderful detail has he required from Canaletti and others?—But is there any reason why we should have "pink spots?"—is there any reason why Turner's foreground figures should resemble penny German dolls?—and for the reason we have above given, there ought to be reason why the figures should be made out, at least as they are in a camera-obscura. We here speak of nature, of "truth," and with him ask, it may be all very well—but "is it true?" But we have another fault to find with Turner's figures; they are often bad in intention. What can be more absurd and incongruous, for instance, than in a picture of "elemental war"—a sea-coast—than to put a child and its nurse in foreground, the child crying because it has lost its hoop, or some such thing? It is according to his truth of space, that distances should have every "hair's-breadth" filled up, all its "infinity," with infinities of objects, but that whatever is near, if figures, may be "pink spots," and "four dashes of the brush." While with Poussin—"masses which result from the eclipse of details are contemptible and painful;" and he thinks Poussin has but "meaningless tricks of clever execution"—forgetting that all art is but a trick—yet one of those tricks worth knowing, and yet which how few have acquired! Surely our author is not well acquainted with Hobbima's works; that painter had not a niggling execution. "A single dusty roll of Turner's brush is more truly expressive of the infinity of foliage, than the niggling of Hobbima could have rendered his canvass, if he had worked on it till doomsday." Our author seems to have studied skies, such as they are in Turner or in nature. He talks of them with no inconsiderable swagger of observation, while the old masters had no observation at all;—"their blunt and feelingless eyes never perceived it in nature; and their untaught imaginations were not likely to originate it in study." What is the it, will be asked—we believe it to be a "cirrus," and that a cirrus is the subject of a chapter to itself. This beard of the sky, however, instead of growing below, is quite above, "never formed below an elevation of at least 15,000 feet, are motionless, multitudinous lines of delicate vapour, with which the blue of the open sky is commonly streaked or speckled after several days of fine weather. They are more commonly known as 'mare's tails.'" Having found this "mare's nest," he delights in it. It is the glory of modern masters. He becomes inflated, and lifts himself 15,000 feet above the level of the understanding of all old masters, and, as we think, of most modern readers, as thus:—"One alone has taken notice of the neglected upper sky; it is his peculiar and favourite field; he has watched its every modification, and given its every phase and feature; at all hours, in all seasons, he has followed its passions and its changes, and has brought down and laid open to the world another apocalypse of heaven." Very well, considering that the cirrus never touches even the highest mountains of Europe, to follow its phase (query faces) and feature 15,000 feet high, and given pink dots, four pink dots for the faces and features of human beings within fifteen feet of his brush. We will not say whether the old masters painted this cirrus or not. We believe they painted what they and we see, at least so much as suited their pictures—but as they were not, generally speaking, exclusively sky-painters, but painters of subjects to which the skies were subordinate, they may be fairly held excused for this their lack of ballooning after the "cirrus;" and we thank them that they were not "glare-seekers," "threading" their way, with it before them, "among the then transparent clouds, while all around the sun is unshadowed fire." We lose him altogether in the "central cloud region," where he helps nature pretty considerably as she "melts even the unoccupied azure into palpitating shades," and hopelessly turns the corner of common observation, and escapes among the "fifty aisles penetrating through angelic chapels to the shechinah of the blue." We must expect him to descend a little vain of his exploit, and so he does—and wonders not that the form and colour of Turner should be misunderstood, for "they require for the full perception of their meaning and truth, such knowledge and such time as not one in a thousand possesses, or can bestow." The inference is, that the graduate has graduated a successful phæton, driving Mr Turner's chariot through all the signs of the zodiac. So he sends all artists, ancient and modern, to Mr Turner's country, as "a magnificent statement, all truth"—that is, "impetuous clouds, twisted rain, flickering sunshine, fleeting shadow, gushing water, and oppressed cattle"—yes, more, it wants repose, and there it is—"High and far above the dark volumes of the swift rain-cloud, are seen on the left, through their opening, the quiet, horizontal, silent flakes of the highest cirrus, resting in the repose of the deep sky;" and there they are, "delicate, soft, passing vapours," and there is "the exquisite depth and palpitating tenderness of the blue with which they are islanded." Thus islanded in tenderness, what wonder is it if Ixion embraced a cloud? Let not the modern lover of nature entertain such a thought; "Bright Phœbus" is no minor canon to smile complacently on the matter; he has a jealousy in him, and won't let any be in a melting mood with the clouds but himself; he tears aside your curtains, and steam-like rags of capricious vapour—"the mouldering sun, seeming not far away, but burning like a red-hot ball beside you, and as if you could reach it, plunges through the rushing wind and rolling cloud with headlong fall, as if it meant to rise no more, dyeing all the air about it with blood." This is no fanciful description, but among the comparative views of nature's and of Turner's skies, as seen, and verified upon his affidavit, by a graduate of Oxford; who may have an indisposition to boast of his exclusive privilege.
"Ἀεροβατῶ και περιφρονῶ τὸν ἥλιον."
Accordingly, in "the effects of light rendered by modern art," our author is very particular indeed. His extraordinary knowledge of the sun's position, to a hair's-breadth in Mr Turner's pictures, and minute of the day, is quite surprising. He gives a table of two pages and a-half, of position and moment, "morning, noon, and afternoon," "evening and night." In more than one instance, he is so close, as "five minutes before sunset."
Having settled the matter of the sky, our author takes the earth in hand, and tosses it about like a Titan. "The spirit of the hills is action, that of the lowlands, repose; and between these there is to be found every variety of motion and of rest, from the inactive plain, sleeping like the firmament, with cities for stars, to the fiery peaks which, with heaving bosoms and exulting limbs, with clouds drifting like hair from their bright foreheads, lift up their Titan hands to heaven saying, 'I live for ever.'" We learn, too, a wonderful power in the excited earth, far beyond that which other "naturalists" describe of the lobster, who only, ad libitum, casts off a claw or so. "But there is this difference between the action of the earth and that of a living creature, that while the exerted limb marks its bones and tendons through the flesh, the excited earth casts off the flesh altogether, and its bones come out from beneath. Mountains are the bones of the earth, their highest peaks are invariably those parts of its anatomy, which in the plains lie buried under five-and-twenty thousand feet of solid thickness of superincumbent soil, and which spring up in the mountain ranges in vast pyramids or wedges, flinging their garment of earth away from them on each side." If the gentle sketcher should happily escape a cuff from these cast-off clothes flung by excited earth from her extremities, he may be satisfied with repose in the lap of mother earth, who must be considerably fat and cushioned, though some may entertain a fear of being overlaid. What is the artist to do with an earth like this, body and bones? When he sits down to sketch some placid landscape, is he to think of poor nature with her bones sticking out from twenty-five thousand feet of her solid flesh! Mother of Gargantia—thou wert but a dwarf! Salvator Rosa could not paint rock; Gaspar Poussin could not paint rock. A rock, in short, is such a thing as nobody ought to paint, or can paint but Turner; and all that, after his description of rock, we believe; but were not prepared to learn that "the foreground of the 'Napoleon' in last year's Academy," is "one of the most exquisite pieces of rock truth ever put on canvass." In fact, we really, in ignorance to be ashamed of, did not know there was any rock there at all. We only remember Napoleon and his cocked-hat—now, this is extraordinary; for as we only or chiefly remember the cocked-hat, so he sees the said cocked-hat in Salvator's rocks, where we never saw such a thing, though "he has succeeded in covering his foregrounds with forms which approximate to those of drapery, of ribands, of crushed cocked-hats, of locks of hair, of waves, of leaves, or any thing, in short, flexible or tough, but which, of course, are not only unlike, but directly contrary to the forms which nature has impressed on rocks." And the nature of rocks he must know, having the "Napoleon" before him. "In the 'Napoleon' I can illustrate by no better example, for I can reason as well from this as I could with my foot on the native rock." What rocks of Salvator's, besides the No. 220 of the Dulwich gallery, he has seen, we cannot pretend to say; we have, within these few days, seen one, and could not discover the "commas," the "Chinese for rocks," nor Sanscrit for rocks, but did read the language of nature, without the necessity of any writing under—"This is a rock." Poor Claude, he knew nothing of perspective, and his efforts "invariably ended in reducing his pond to the form of a round O, and making it look perpendicular;" but in one instance Claude luckily hits upon "a little bit of accidental truth;" he is circumstantial in its locality—"the little piece of ground above the cattle, between the head of the brown cow and the tail of the white one, is well articulated, just where it turns into shade."
After the entire failure of all artists that ever lived before Turner in land and skies, we are prepared to find that they had not the least idea of water. When they thought they painted water, in fact, they were like "those happier children, sliding on dry ground," and had not the chance of wetting a foot. Water, too, is a thing to be anatomized, a sort of rib-fluidity. The moving, transparent water, in shallow and in depth, of Vandervelde and Backhuysen, is not the least like water; they are men who "libelled the sea." Many of our moderns—Stanfield in particular—seem naturally web-footed; but the real Triton of the sea, as he was Titan of the earth, is Turner. To our own eyes, in this respect, he stands indebted to the engraver; for we do not remember a single sea-piece by Turner, in water-colour or oil, in which the water is liquid. What it is like, in the picture of the Slave-ship, which is considered one of his very finest productions, we defy any one to tell. We are led to guess it is meant for water, by the strange fish that take their pastime. A year or two ago were exhibited two sea-pieces, of nearly equal size, at the British Institution, by Vandervelde and Turner. It was certainly one of Turner's best; but how inferior was the water and the sky to the water and sky in Vandervelde! In Turner they were both rocky. We say not this to the disparagement of Turner's genius. He had not studied these elements as did Vandervelde. The two painters ought not to be compared together; and we humbly think that any man who should pronounce of Vandervelde and Backhuysen, that they "libelled the sea," convicts himself of a wondrous lack of taste and feeling. Of their works he thus speaks—"As it is, I believe there is scarcely such another instance to be found in the history of man, of the epidemic aberration of mind into which multitudes fall by infection, as is furnished by the value set upon the works of these men." Of water, he says—"Nothing can hinder water from being a reflecting medium but dry dust or filth of some kind on its surface. Dirty water, if the foul matter be dissolved or suspended in the liquid, reflects just as clearly and sharply as pure water, only the image is coloured by the hue of the mixed matter, and becomes comparatively brown or dark." We entirely deny this, from constant observation. Within this week we have been studying a stream, which has alternated in its clearness and muddiness. We found the reflection not only less clear in the latter case, but instead of brown and dark, to have lost its brownness, and to have become lighter. To understand the "curves" of water being beyond the reach of most who are not graduates of Oxford; and painters and admirers of old masters being people without sense, at least in comparison with the graduate, he thus disposes of his learned difficulty:—"This is a point, however, on which it is impossible to argue without going into high mathematics, and even then the nature of particular curves, as given by the brush, would be scarcely demonstrable; and I am the less disposed to take much trouble about it, because I think that the persons who are really fond of these works are almost beyond the reach of argument." The celebrated Mrs Partington once endeavoured, at Sidmouth, to dispose of these "curves," and failed; and we suspect a stronger reason than the incapacity of his readers for our author's thus disposing of the subject. We believe the world would not give a pin's head for all the seas that ever might be painted upon these mathematical curves; and that, in painting, even a graduate's "high mathematics" are but a very low affair. But let us enliven the reader with something really high—and here is, in very high-flown prose, part of a description of a waterfall; and it will tell him a secret, that in the midst of these fine falls, nature keeps a furnace and steam-engine continually at work, and having the fire at hand, sends up rockets—if you doubt—read:—"And how all the hollows of that foam burn with green fire, like so much shattering chrysoprase; and how, ever and anon, startling you with its white flash, a jet of spray leaps hissing out of the fall, like a rocket, bursting in the wind, and driven away in dust, filling the air with light; and how, through the curdling wreaths of the restless, crashing abyss below, the blue of the water, paled by the foam in its body, shows purer than the sky through white rain-cloud, while the shuddering iris stoops in tremulous stillness over all, fading and flashing alternately through the choking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding itself at last among the thick golden leaves, which toss to and fro in sympathy with the wild water, their dripping masses lifted at intervals, like sheaves of loaded corn, by some stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again upon the mossy rocks as its roar dies away." "Satque superque satis"—we cannot go on. There is nothing like calling things by their contraries—it is truly startling. Whenever you speak of water, treat it as fire—of fire, vice versa, as water; and be sure to send them all shattering out of reach and discrimination of all sense; and look into a dictionary for some such word as "chrysoprase," which we find to come from χρυσος gold, and πρασον a leek, and means a precious stone; it is capable of being shattered, together with "sunshine"—the reader will think the whole passage a "flash" of moonshine. But there is a discovery—"I believe, when you have stood by this for half an hour, you will have discovered that there is something more in nature than has been given by Ruysdaël." You will indeed—if this be nature! But, alas, what have we not to undergo—to discover what water is, and to become capable of judging of Turner! It is a comfort, however, that he is likely to have but few judges. Graduate has courage to undergo any thing. Ariel was nothing in his ubiquity to him, though he put a span about the world in forty minutes; "but there was some apology for the public's not understanding this, for few people have had the opportunity of seeing the sea at such a time, and when they have, cannot face it. To hold by a mast or rock, and watch it, is a prolonged endurance of drowning, which few people have courage to go through. To those who have, it is one of the noblest lessons in nature." Very few people, indeed, and those few "involuntary experimentalists."
We are glad to get on dry land again, "brown furze or any thing"—and here we must question one of his truths of vegetation: he asserts, that the stems of all trees, the "ordinary trees of Europe, do not taper, but grow up or out, in undiminished thickness, till they throw out branch and bud, and then go off again to the next of equal thickness." We have carefully examined many trees this last week, and find it is not the case; in almost all, the bulging at the bottom, nearest the root, is manifest. There is an early association in our minds, that the birch for instance is remarkably tapering in its twigs. We would rather refer our "sworn measurer" to the factor than the painter, and we very much question whether his "top and top" will meet the market. We are satisfied the fact is not as he states it, and surely nature works not by such measure rule. We suspect, for nature we should here read Turner, for his trees, certainly, are strange things; it is true, he generally shirks them. We do not remember one picture that has a good, true, bona fide, conspicuous tree in it. The reader will not be surprised to learn that the worst painter of trees was Gaspar Poussin! and that the perfection of trees is to be found in Turner's "Marley," where most people will think the trees look more like brooms than trees. The chapter on "the Truth of Turner" concludes with a quotation—we presume the extract from a letter from Mr Turner to the author. If so, Mr Turner has somewhat caught the author's style, and tells very simple truths in a very fine manner, thus:—"I cannot gather the sunbeams out of the east, or I would make them tell you what I have seen; but read this, and interpret this, and let us remember together. I cannot gather the gloom out of the night-sky, or I would make that teach you what I have seen; but read this, and interpret this, and let us feel together." We must pause. Really we do not see the slightest necessity of an interpretation here. It is a simple fact. He cannot extract "sunbeams" from cucumbers—from the east, we should say. The only riddle seems to be, that they should, in one instance, remember together, and in the other, feel together; only we guess that, being night-gloom, people naturally feel about them in the dark. But he proceeds—"And if you have not that within you which I can summon to my aid, if you have not the sun in your spirit, and the passion in your heart, which my words may awaken, though they be indistinct and swift, leave me." We must pause again; here is a riddle: what can be the meaning of having the sun in one's spirit?—is it any thing like having the moon in one's head? We give it up. The passion in the heart we suppose to be dead asleep, and the words and voice harsh and grating, and so it is awakened. But what that if, or if not, has to do with "leave me," we cannot conjecture; but this we do venture to conjecture, that to expect our graduate ever to leave Mr Turner is one of the most hopeless of all Mr Turner's "Fallacies of Hope." But the writer proceeds with a for—that appears, nevertheless, a pretty considerable non-sequitur. "For I will give you no patient mockery, no laborious insult of that glorious nature, whose I am and whom I serve." Here the graduate is treated as a servant, and the writer of the letter assumes the Pythian, the truly oracular vein. "Let other servants imitate the voice and the gesture of their master while they forget his message. Hear that message from me, but remember that the teaching of Divine Truth must still be a mystery." "Like master like man." Both are in the "Cambyses' vein."
We do not think that landscape painters will either gain or lose much by the publication of this volume, unless it be some mortification to be so sillily lauded as some of our very respectable painters are. We do not think that the pictorial world, either in taste or practice, will be Turnerized by this palpably fulsome, nonsensical praise. In this our graduate is semper idem, and to keep up his idolatry to the sticking-point, terminates the volume with a prayer, and begs all the people of England to join in it—a prayer to Mr Turner!