Modern Painters Volume IV Part 21

[92] It might be thought at first that the line to which such curves would approximate would be the cycloid, as the line of quickest descent. But in reality the contour is modified by perpetual sliding of the debris under the influence of rain; and by the bounding of detached fragments with continually increased momentum. I was quite unable to get at anything like the expression of a constant law among the examples I studied in the Alps, except only the great laws of delicacy and changefulness in all curves whatsoever.

[93] I owe Mr. Le Keux sincere thanks, and not a little admiration, for the care and skill with which he has followed, on a much reduced scale, the detail of this drawing.

[94] Allow ten feet square for average s.p.a.ce to each pine; suppose the valley seen only for five miles of its length, and the pine district two miles broad on each side--a low estimate of breadth also: this would give five millions.

[95] The white spots on the brow of the little cliff are lichens, only four or five inches broad.

[96] What a _comfortable_, as well as intelligent, operation, sketching from nature must have been in those days!

[97] It is not one of the highest points of the Carrara chain. The chief summits are much more jagged, and very n.o.ble. See Chap. XX. -- 20.

CHAPTER XVIII.

RESULTING FORMS:--FIFTHLY, STONES.

-- 1. It is somewhat singular that the indistinctness of treatment which has been so often noticed as characteristic of our present art shows itself always most when there is least apparent reason for it. Modern artists, having some true sympathy with what is vague in nature, draw all that is uncertain and evasive without evasion, and render faithfully whatever can be discerned in faithless mist or mocking vapors; but having no sympathy with what is solid and serene, they seem to become uncertain themselves in proportion to the certainty of what they see; and while they render flakes of far-away cloud, or fringes of inextricable forest, with something like patience and fidelity, give nothing but the hastiest indication of the ground they can tread upon or touch. It is only in modern art that we find any complete representation of clouds, and only in ancient art that, generally speaking, we find any careful realization of Stones.

-- 2. This is all the more strange, because, as we saw some time back, the _ruggedness_ of the stone is more pleasing to the modern than the mediaeval, and he rarely completes any picture satisfactorily to himself unless large s.p.a.ces of it are filled with irregular masonry, rocky banks, or shingly sh.o.r.es: whereas the mediaeval could conceive no desirableness in the loose and unhewn ma.s.ses; a.s.sociated them generally in his mind with wicked men, and the Martyrdom of St. Stephen; and always threw them out of his road, or garden, to the best of his power.

Yet with all this difference in predilection, such was the honesty of the mediaeval, and so firm his acknowledgment of the necessity to paint completely whatever was to be painted at all, that there is hardly a strip of earth under the feet of a saint, in any finished work of the early painters, but more, and better painted, stones are to be found upon it than in an entire exhibition full of modern mountain scenery.

-- 3. Not better painted in every respect. In those interesting and popular treatises on the art of drawing, which tell the public that their colors should neither be too warm nor too cold, and that their touches should always be characteristic of the object they are intended to represent, the directions given for the manufacture of stones usually enforce "crispness of outline" and "roughness of texture." And, accordingly, in certain expressions of frangibility, irregular acc.u.mulation, and easy resting of one block upon another, together with some conditions of lichenous or mossy texture, modern stone-painting is far beyond the ancient; for these are just the characters which first strike the eye, and enable the foreground to maintain its picturesque influence, without inviting careful examination. The mediaeval painter, on the other hand, not caring for this picturesque general effect, nor being in anywise familiar with mountain scenery, perceived in stones, when he was forced to paint them, eminently the characters which they had in common with figures; that is to say, their curved outlines, rounded surfaces, and varieties of delicate color, and, accordingly, was somewhat too apt to lose their angular and fragmentary character in a series of muscular lines resembling those of an anatomical preparation; for, although in large rocks the cleavable or frangible nature was the thing that necessarily struck him most, the pebbles under his feet were apt to be oval or rounded in the localities of almost all the important schools of Italy. In Lombardy, the ma.s.s of the ground is composed of nothing but Alpine gravel, consisting of rolled oval pebbles, on the average about six inches long by four wide--awkward building materials, yet used in ingenious alternation with the bricks in all the lowland Italian fortresses. Besides this universal rotundity, the qualities of stones which rendered them valuable to the lapidary were forced on the painter's attention by the familiar arts of inlaying and mosaic. Hence, in looking at a pebble, his mind was divided between its roundness and its veins; and Leonardo covers the shelves of rock under the feet of St.

Anne with variegated agates; while Mantegna often strews the small stones about his mountain caves in a polished profusion, as if some repentant martyr princess had been just scattering her caskets of pearls into the dust.

-- 4. Some years ago, as I was talking of the curvilinear forms in a piece of rock to one of our academicians, he said to me, in a somewhat despondent accent, "If you look for curves, you will see curves; if you look for angles, you will see angles."

The saying appeared to me an infinitely sad one. It was the utterance of an experienced man; and in many ways true, for one of the most singular gifts, or, if abused, most singular weaknesses, of the human mind is its power of persuading itself to see whatever it chooses;--a great gift, if directed to the discernment of the things needful and pertinent to its own work and being; a great weakness, if directed to the discovery of things profitless or discouraging. In all things throughout the world, the men who look for the crooked will see the crooked, and the men who look for the straight will see the straight. But yet the saying was a notably sad one; for it came of the conviction in the speaker's mind that there was in reality _no_ crooked and _no_ straight; that all so called discernment was fancy, and that men might, with equal rect.i.tude of judgment, and good-deserving of their fellow-men, perceive and paint whatever was convenient to them.

-- 5. Whereas things may always be seen truly by candid people, though never _completely_. No human capacity ever yet saw the whole of a thing; but we may see more and more of it the longer we look. Every individual temper will see something different in it: but supposing the tempers honest, all the differences are there. Every advance in our acuteness of perception will show us something new; but the old and first discerned thing will still be there, not falsified, only modified and enriched by the new perceptions, becoming continually more beautiful in its harmony with them and more approved as a part of the Infinite truth.

-- 6. There are no natural objects out of which more can be thus learned than out of stones. They seem to have been created especially to reward a patient observer. Nearly all other objects in nature can be seen, to some extent, without patience, and are pleasant even in being half seen.

Trees, clouds, and rivers are enjoyable even by the careless; but the stone under his foot has for carelessness nothing in it but stumbling; no pleasure is languidly to be had out of it, nor food, nor good of any kind; nothing but symbolism of the hard heart and the unfatherly gift.

And yet, do but give it some reverence and watchfulness, and there is bread of thought in it, more than in any other lowly feature of all the landscape.

-- 7. For a stone, when it is examined, will be found a mountain in miniature. The fineness of Nature's work is so great, that, into a single block, a foot or two in diameter, she can compress as many changes of form and structure, on a small scale, as she needs for her mountains on a large one; and, taking moss for forests, and grains of crystal for crags, the surface of a stone, in by far the plurality of instances, is more interesting than the surface of an ordinary hill; more fantastic in form and incomparably richer in color,--the last quality being, in fact, so n.o.ble in most stones of good birth (that is to say, fallen from the crystalline mountain-ranges), that I shall be less able to ill.u.s.trate this part of my subject satisfactorily by means of engraving than perhaps any other, except the color of skies. I say, _shall_ be less able, because the beauty of stone surface is in so great a degree dependent on the mosses and lichens which root themselves upon it, that I must place my richest examples in the section on vegetation.

For instance, in the plate opposite, though the ma.s.s of rock is large and somewhat distant, the effect of it is as much owing to the white spots of silvery lichen in the centre and left, and to the flowing lines in which the darker mosses, growing in the cranny, have arranged themselves beyond, as to the character of the rock itself; nor could the beauty of the whole ma.s.s be explained, if we were to approach the least nearer, without more detailed drawing of this vegetation. For the present I shall only give a few examples of the drawing of stones roughly broken, or worn so as not to be materially affected by vegetation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 48. Bank of Slaty Crystallines.]

-- 8. We have already seen an example of t.i.tian's treatment of mountain crests as compared with Turner's; here is a parallel instance, from t.i.tian, of stones in the bed of a torrent (Fig. 108), in many ways good and right, and expressing in its writhed and variously broken lines far more of real stone structure than the common water-color dash of the moderns. Observe, especially, how t.i.tian has understood that the fracture of the stone more or less depends on the undulating grain of its crystalline structure, following the cavity of the largest stone in the middle of the figure, with concentric lines; and compare in Plate +21+ the top of Turner's largest stones on the left.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 108.]

-- 9. If the reader sees nothing in this drawing (Fig. 108) that he can like,--although, indeed, I would have him prefer the work of Turner,--let him be a.s.sured that he does not yet understand on what t.i.tian's reputation is founded. No painter's name is oftener in the mouth of the ordinary connoisseur, and no painter was ever less understood. His power of color is indeed perfect, but so is Bonifazio's. t.i.tian's _supremacy_ above all the other Venetians, except Tintoret and Veronese, consists in the firm truth of his portraiture, and more or less masterly understanding of the nature of stones, trees, men, or whatever else he took in hand to paint; so that, without some correlative understanding in the spectator, t.i.tian's work, in its highest qualities, must be utterly dead and unappealing to him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 109.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 110.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 111.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 112.]

-- 10. I give one more example from the lower part of the same print (Fig. 109), in which a stone, with an eddy round it, is nearly as well drawn as it can be in the simple method of the early wood-engraving.

Perhaps the reader will feel its truth better by contrast with a fragment or two of modern Idealism. Here, for instance (Fig. 110), is a group of stones, highly entertaining in their variety of form, out of the subject of "Christian vanquishing Apollyon," in the outlines to the Pilgrim's Progress, published by the Art-Union, the idealism being here wrought to a pitch of extraordinary brilliancy by the exciting nature of the subject. Next (Fig. 111) is another poetical conception, one of Flaxman's, representing the eddies and stones of the Pool of Envy (Flaxman's Dante), which may be conveniently compared with the t.i.tianesque stones and streams. And, finally, Fig. 112 represents, also on Flaxman's authority, those stones of an "Alpine" character, of which Dante says that he

"Climbed with heart of proof the adverse steep."

It seems at first curious that every one of the forms that Flaxman has chanced upon should be an impossible one--a form which a stone never could a.s.sume: but this is the Nemesis of false idealism, and the inevitable one.

-- 11. The chief incapacity in the modern work is not, however, so much in its outline, though that is wrong enough, as in the total absence of any effort to mark the surface roundings. It is not the _outline_ of a stone, however true, that will make it solid or heavy; it is the interior markings, and thoroughly understood perspectives of its sides.

In the opposite plate the upper two subjects are by Turner, foregrounds out of the Liber Studiorum (Source of Arveron, and Ben Arthur); the lower by Claude, Liber Veritatis, No. 5. I think the reader cannot but feel that the blocks in the upper two subjects are ma.s.sy and ponderous; in the lower, wholly without weight. If he examine their several treatment, he will find that Turner has perfect imaginative conception of every recess and projection over the whole surface, and _feels_ the stone as he works over it; every touch, moreover, being full of tender gradation. But Claude, as he is obliged to hold to his outline in hills, so also clings to it in the stones,--cannot round them in the least, leaves their light surfaces wholly blank, and puts a few patches of dark here and there about their edges, as chance will have it.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 49. Truth and Untruth of Stones.]

-- 12. Turner's way of wedging the stones of the glacier moraine together in strength of disorder, in the upper subject, and his indication of the springing of the wild stems and leaf.a.ge out of the rents in the boulders of the lower one, will hardly be appreciated unless the reader is _fondly_ acquainted with the kind of scenery in question; and I cannot calculate on this being often the case, for few persons ever look at any near detail closely, and perhaps least of all at the heaps of debris which so often seem to enc.u.mber and disfigure mountain ground. But for the various reasons just stated (-- 7), Turner found more material for his power, and more excitement to his invention, among the fallen stones than in the highest summits of mountains; and his early designs, among their thousand excellences and singularities, as opposed to all that had preceded them, count for not one of the least the elaborate care given to the drawing of torrent beds, shaly slopes, and other conditions of stony ground which all canons of art at the period p.r.o.nounced inconsistent with dignity of composition; a convenient principle, since, of all foregrounds, one of loose stones is beyond comparison the most difficult to draw with any approach to realization. The Turnerian subjects, "Junction of the Greta and Tees" (Yorkshire Series, and ill.u.s.trations to Scott); "Wycliffe, near Rokeby" (Yorkshire); "Hardraw Fall" (Yorkshire); "Ben Arthur" (Liber Studiorum); "Ulleswater" and the magnificent drawing of the "Upper Fall of the Tees" (England Series), are sufficiently ill.u.s.trative of what I mean.

-- 13. It is not, however, only, in their separate condition, as materials of foreground, that we have to examine the effect of stones; they form a curiously important element of distant landscape in their aggregation on a large scale.

It will be remembered that in the course of the last chapter we wholly left out of our account of mountain lines that group which was called "Lines of Rest." One reason for doing so was that, as these lines are produced by debris in a state of temporary repose, their beauty, or deformity, or whatever character they may possess, is properly to be considered as belonging to stones rather than to rocks.

-- 14. Whenever heaps of loose stones or sand are increased by the continual fall of fresh fragments from above, or diminished by their removal from below, yet not in such ma.s.s or with such momentum as entirely to disturb those already acc.u.mulated, the materials on the surface arrange themselves in an equable slope, producing a straight line of profile in the bank or cone.

The heap formed by the sand falling in an hour-gla.s.s presents, in its straight sides, the simplest result of such a condition; and any heap of sand thrown up by the spade will show the slopes here and there, interrupted only by knotty portions, held together by moisture, or agglutinated by pressure,--interruptions which cannot occur to the same extent on a large scale, unless the soil is really hardened nearly to the nature of rock. As long as it remains incoherent, every removal of substance at the bottom of the heap, or addition of it at the top, occasions a sliding disturbance of the whole slope, which smooths it into rect.i.tude of line; and there is hardly any great mountain ma.s.s among the Alps which does not show towards its foundation perfectly regular descents of this nature, often two or three miles long without a break. Several of considerable extent are seen on the left of Plate +46+.

-- 15. I call these lines of rest, because, though the bulk of the ma.s.s may be continually increasing or diminishing, the line of the profile does not change, being fixed at a certain angle by the nature of the earth. It is usually stated carelessly as an angle of about 45 degrees, but it never really reaches such a slope. I measured carefully the angles of a very large number of slopes of mountain in various parts of the Mont Blanc district. The few examples given in the note below are enough to exhibit the general fact that loose debris lies at various angles up to about 30 or 32; debris protected by gra.s.s or pines may reach 35, and rocky slopes 40 or 41, but in continuous lines of rest I never found a steeper angle.[98]

-- 16. I speak of some rocky slopes as lines of rest, because, whenever a mountain side is composed of soft stone which splits and decomposes fast, it has a tendency to choke itself up with the ruins, and gradually to get abraded or ground down towards the debris slope; so that vast ma.s.ses of the sides of Alpine valleys are formed by ascents of nearly uniform inclination, partly loose, partly of jagged rocks, which break, but do not materially alter the general line of ground. In such cases the fragments usually have acc.u.mulated without disturbance at the foot of the slope, and the pine forests fasten the soil and prevent it from being carried down in large ma.s.ses. But numerous instances occur in which the mountain is consumed away gradually by its own torrents, not having strength enough to form clefts or precipices, but falling on each side of the ravines into even banks, which slide down from above as they are wasted below.

-- 17. By all these various expedients, Nature secures, in the midst of her mountain curvatures, vast series of perfectly straight lines opposing and relieving them; lines, however, which artists have almost universally agreed to alter or ignore, partly disliking them intrinsically, on account of their formality, and partly because the mind instantly a.s.sociates them with the idea of mountain decay. Turner, however, saw that this very decay having its use and n.o.bleness, the contours which were significative of it ought no more to be omitted than, in the portrait of an aged man, the furrows on his hand or brow; besides, he liked the lines themselves, for their contrast with the mountain wildness, just as he liked the straightness of sunbeams penetrating the soft waywardness of clouds. He introduced them constantly into his n.o.blest compositions; but in order to the full understanding of their employment in the instance I am about to give, one or two more points yet need to be noticed.

-- 18. Generally speaking, the curved lines of convex, _fall_ belong to mountains of hard rock, over whose surfaces the fragments _bound_ to the valley, and which are worn by wrath of avalanches and wildness of torrents, like that of the Cascade des Pelerins, described in the note above. Generally speaking, the straight lines of _rest_ belong to softer mountains, or softer surfaces and places of mountains, which, exposed to no violent wearing from external force, nevertheless keep slipping and mouldering down spontaneously or receiving gradual accession of material from incoherent ma.s.ses above them.

-- 19. It follows, rather, that where the gigantic wearing forces are in operation, the stones or fragments of rock brought down by the torrents and avalanches are likely, however hard, to be rounded on all their edges; but where the straight shaly slopes are found, the stones which glide or totter down their surfaces frequently retain all their angles, and form jagged and flaky heaps at the bottom.

And farther, it is to be supposed that the rocks which are habitually subjected to these colossal forces of destruction are in their own ma.s.s firm and secure, otherwise they would long ago have given way; but that where the gliding and crumbling surfaces are found without much external violence, it is very possible that the whole framework of the mountain may be full of flaws; and a danger exist of vast portions of its ma.s.s giving way, or slipping down in heaps, as the sand suddenly yields in an hour-gla.s.s after some moments of acc.u.mulation.

-- 20. Hence, generally, in the mind of any one familiar with mountains, the conditions will be a.s.sociated, on the one hand, of the curved, convex, and overhanging bank or cliff, the roaring torrent, and the rounded boulder of ma.s.sive stone; and, on the other, of the straight and even slope of bank, the comparatively quiet and peaceful lapse of streams, and the sharp-edged and unworn look of the fallen stones, together with a sense of danger greater, though more occult, than in the wilder scenery.

[Ill.u.s.tration: J. M. W. Turner J. Cousen.

50. Goldau.]

The drawing of the St. Gothard, which we have so laboriously a.n.a.lyzed, was designed, as before mentioned, from a sketch taken in the year 1843.

But with it was made another drawing. Turner brought home in that year a series of sketches taken in the neighborhood of the pa.s.s; among others, one of the Valley of Goldau, covered as it is by the ruins of the Rossberg. Knowing his fondness for fallen stones, I chose this Goldau subject as a companion to the St. Gothard. The plate opposite will give some idea of the resultant drawing.