BY A FARMER.
III.
Will any of our artists ever give us, on canvas, a good, rattling, saucy shower? There is room in it for a rare handling of the brush:—the vague, indistinguishable line of hills, (as I see them to-day,)—the wild scud of gray, with fine gray lines, slanted by the wind, and trending eagerly downward,—the swift, petulant dash into the little pools of the highway, making fairy bubbles that break as soon as they form,—the land smoking with excess of moisture,—and the pelted leaves all wincing and shining and adrip.
I know no painter who has so well succeeded in putting a wet sky into his pictures as Turner; and in this I judge him by the literal chiaroscuro of engraving. In proof of it, I take down from my shelf his "Rivers of France": a book over which I have spent a great many pleasant hours, and idle ones too,—if it be idle to travel leagues at the turning of a page, and to see hill-sides spotty with vineyards, and great bridges wallowing through the Loire, and to watch the fishermen of Honfleur putting to sea. There are skies, as I said, in some of these pictures which make a man instinctively think of his umbrella, or of his distance from home: no actual rain-drift stretching from them, but such unmistakable promise of a rainy afternoon, in their little parallel wisps of dark-bottomed clouds, as would make a provident farmer order every scythe out of the field.
In the "Chair of Gargantua," on which my eye falls, as I turn over the pages, an actual thunder-storm is breaking. The scene is somewhere upon the Lower Seine. From the middle of the left of the picture the lofty river-bank stretches far across, forming all the background;—its extreme distance hidden by a bold thrust of the right bank, which juts into the picture just far enough to shelter a white village, which lies gleaming upon the edge of the water. On all the foreground lies the river, broad as a bay. The storm is coming down the stream. Over the left spur of the bank, and over the meeting of the banks, it broods black as night. Through a little rift there is a glimpse of serene sky, from which a mellow light streams down upon the edges and angles of a few cliffs upon the farther shore. All the rest is heavily shadowed. The edges of the coming tempest are tortuous and convulsed, and you know that a fierce wind is driving the black billows on; yet all the water under the lee of the shores is as tranquil as a dream; a white sail, near to the white village, hangs slouchingly to the mast: but in the foreground the tempest has already caught the water; a tall lugger is scudding and careening under it as if mad; the crews of three fishermen's boats, that toss on the vexed water, are making a confused rush to shorten sail, and you may almost fancy that you hear their outcries sweeping down the wind. In the middle scene, a little steamer is floating tranquilly on water which is yet calm; and a column of smoke piling up from its tall chimney rises for a space placidly enough, until the wind catches and whisks it before the storm. I would wager ten to one, upon the mere proof in the picture, that the fishermen and the washerwomen in the foreground will be drenched within an hour.
When I have once opened the covers of Turner,—especially upon such a wet day as this,—it is hard for me to leave him until I have wandered all up and down the Loire, revisited Tours and its quiet cathedral, and Blois with its stately chateau, and Amboise with its statelier, and coquetted again with memories of the Maid of Orléans.
From the Upper Loire it is easy to slip into the branching valleys which sidle away from it far down into the country of the Auvergne. Turner does not go there, indeed; the more's the pity; but I do, since it is the most attractive region rurally (Brittany perhaps excepted) in all France. The valleys are green, the brooks are frequent, the rivers are tortuous, the mountains are high, and luxuriant walnut-trees embower the roads. It was near to Moulins, on the way hither, through the pleasant Bourbonnois, that Tristram Shandy met with the poor, half-crazed Maria, piping her evening service to the Virgin.
And at that thought I must do no less than pull down my "Tristram Shandy," (on which the dust of years has accumulated,) and read again that tender story of the lorn maiden, with her attendant goat, and her hair caught up in a silken fillet, and her shepherd's pipe, from which she pours out a low, plaintive wail upon the evening air.
It is not a little singular that a British author should have supplied the only Arcadian resident of all this Arcadian region. The Abbé Delille was, indeed, born hereabout, within sight of the bold Puy de Dome, and within marketing-distance of the beautiful Clermont. But there is very little that is Arcadian, in freshness or simplicity, in either the "Gardens" or the other verse of Delille.
Out of his own mouth (the little green-backed book, my boy) I will condemn him:—