Modern Painters Volume I Part 32

-- 17. And in the Avalanche and Inundation.

Again, in the Avalanche and Inundation, we have for the whole subject nothing but one vast bank of united mountain, and one stretch of uninterrupted valley. Though the bank is broken into promontory beyond promontory, peak above peak, each the abode of a new tempest, the arbiter of a separate desolation, divided from each other by the rushing of the snow, by the motion of the storm, by the thunder of the torrent; the mighty unison of their dark and lofty line, the brotherhood of ages, is preserved unbroken; and the broad valley at their feet, though measured league after league away by a thousand pa.s.sages of sun and darkness, and marked with fate beyond fate of hamlet and of inhabitant, lies yet but as a straight and narrow channel, a filling furrow before the flood. Whose work will you compare with this? Salvator's gray heaps of earth, seven yards high, covered with bunchy brambles, that we may be under no mistake about the size, thrown about at random in a little plain, beside a zigzagging river, just wide enough to admit of the possibility of there being fish in it, and with banks just broad enough to allow the respectable angler or hermit to sit upon them conveniently in the foreground? Is there more of nature in such paltriness, think you, than in the valley and the mountain which bend to each other like the trough of the sea; with the flank of the one swept in one surge into the height of heaven, until the pine forests lie on its immensity like the shadows of narrow clouds, and the hollow of the other laid league by league into the blue of the air, until its white villages flash in the distance only like the fall of a sunbeam?

-- 18. The rarity among secondary hills of steep slopes or high precipices.

But let us examine by what management of the details themselves this wholeness and vastness of effect are given. We have just seen (-- 11) that it is impossible for the slope of a mountain, not actually a precipice of rock, to exceed 35 or among secondary 40, and that by far the greater part of all hill-surface is composed of graceful curves of much less degree than this, reaching 40 only as their ultimate and utmost inclination. It must be farther observed that the interruptions to such curves, by precipices or steps, are always small in proportion to the slopes themselves. Precipices rising vertically more than 100 feet are very rare among the secondary hills of which we are speaking. I am not aware of any cliff in England or Wales where a plumb-line can swing clear for 200 feet; and even although sometimes, with intervals, breaks, and steps, we get perhaps 800 feet of a slope of 60 or 70, yet not only are these cases very rare, but even these have little influence on the great contours of a mountain 4000 or 5000 feet in elevation, being commonly balanced by intervals of ascent not exceeding 6 or 8.

The result of which is, first, that the peaks and precipices of a mountain appear as little more than jags or steps emerging from its great curves; and, secondly, that the bases of all hills are enormously extensive as compared with their elevation, so that there must be always a horizontal distance between the observer and the summit five or six times exceeding the perpendicular one.

-- 19. And consequent expression of horizontal distance in their ascent.

Now it is evident, that whatever the actual angle of elevation of the mountain may be, every exhibition of this horizontal distance between us and the summit is an addition to its height, and of course to its impressiveness; while every endeavor to exhibit its slope as steep and sudden, is diminution at once of its distance and elevation. In consequence nature is constantly endeavoring to impress upon us this horizontal distance, which, even in spite of all her means of manifesting it, we are apt to forget or underestimate; and all her n.o.blest effects depend on the full measurement and feeling of it. And it is to the abundant and marvellous expression of it by Turner, that I would direct especial attention, as being that which is in itself demonstrative of the highest knowledge and power--knowledge, in the constant use of lines of subdued slope in preference to steep or violent ascents, and in the perfect subjection of all such features, when they necessarily occur, to the larger ma.s.ses; and power, in the inimitable statements of retiring s.p.a.ce by mere painting of surface details, without the aid of crossing shadows, divided forms, or any other artifice.

-- 20. Full statement of all these facts in various works of Turner, Caudebec, etc.

The Caudebec, in the Rivers of France, is a fine instance of almost every fact which we have been pointing out. We have in it, first, the clear expression of what takes place constantly among hills,--that the river, as it pa.s.ses through the valley, will fall backwards and forwards from side to side, lying first, if I may so speak, with all its weight against the hills on the one side, and then against those on the other; so that, as here it is exquisitely told, in each of its circular sweeps the whole force of its current is brought deep and close to the bases of the hills, while the water on the side next the plain is shallow, deepening gradually. In consequence of this, the hills are cut away at their bases by the current, so that their slopes are interrupted by precipices mouldering to the water. Observe first, how n.o.bly Turner has given us the perfect unity of the whole ma.s.s of hill, making us understand that every ravine in it has been cut gradually by streams.

The first eminence, beyond the city, is not disjointed from, or independent of, the one succeeding, but evidently part of the same whole, originally united, separated only by the action of the stream between. The a.s.sociation of the second and third is still more clearly told, for we see that there has been a little longitudinal valley running along the brow of their former united ma.s.s, which, after the ravine had been cut between, formed the two jags which Turner has given us at the same point in each of their curves. This great triple group has, however, been originally distinct from those beyond it; for we see that these latter are only the termination of the enormous even slope, which appears again on the extreme right, having been interrupted by the rise of the near hills. Observe how the descent of the whole series is kept gentle and subdued, never suffered to become steep except where it has been cut away by the river, the sudden precipice caused by which is exquisitely marked in the last two promontories, where they are defined against the bright horizon; and, finally, observe how, in the ascent of the nearest eminence beyond the city, without one cast shadow or any division of distances, every yard of surface is felt to be retiring by the mere painting of its details,--how we are permitted to walk up it, and along its top, and are carried, before we are half way up, a league or two forward into the picture. The difficulty of doing this, however, can scarcely be appreciated except by an artist.

-- 21. The use of considering geological truths.

I do not mean to a.s.sert that this great painter is acquainted with the geological laws and facts he has thus ill.u.s.trated; I am not aware whether he be or not; I merely wish to demonstrate, in points admitting of demonstration, that intense observation of, and strict adherence to truth, which it is impossible to demonstrate in its less tangible and more delicate manifestations. However I may _feel_ the truth of every touch and line, I cannot _prove_ truth, except in large and general features; and I leave it to the arbitration of every man's reason, whether it be not likely that the painter who is thus so rigidly faithful in great things that every one of his pictures might be the ill.u.s.tration of a lecture on the physical sciences, is not likely to be faithful also in small.

-- 22. Expression of retiring surface by Turner contrasted with the work of Claude.

Honfleur, and the scene between Clairmont and Mauves, supply us with farther instances of the same grand simplicity of treatment; and the latter is especially remarkable for its expression of the furrowing of the hills by descending water, in the complete roundness and symmetry of their curves, and in the delicate and sharp shadows which are cast in the undulating ravines. It is interesting to compare with either of these n.o.ble works such hills as those of Claude, on the left of the picture marked 260 in the Dulwich Gallery. There is no detail nor surface in one of them; not an inch of ground for us to stand upon; we must either sit astride upon the edge, or fall to the bottom. I could not point to a more complete instance of mountain calumniation; nor can I oppose it more completely, in every circ.u.mstance, than with the Honfleur of Turner, already mentioned; in which there is not one edge nor division admitted, and yet we are permitted to climb up the hill from the town, and pa.s.s far into the mist along its top, and so descend mile after mile along the ridge to seaward, until, without one break in the magnificent unity of progress, we are carried down to the utmost horizon. And contrast the brown paint of Claude, which you can only guess to be meant for rock or soil because it _is_ brown, with Turner's profuse, pauseless richness of feature, carried through all the enormous s.p.a.ce--the unmeasured wealth of exquisite detail, over which the mind can dwell, and walk, and wander, and feast forever, without finding either one break in its vast simplicity, or one vacuity in its exhaustless splendor.

-- 23. The same moderation of slope in the contours of his higher hills.

But these, and hundreds of others which it is sin not to dwell upon--wooded hills and undulating moors of North England--rolling surges of park and forest of the South--soft and vine-clad ranges of French coteaux, casting their oblique shadows on silver leagues of glancing rivers,--and olive-whitened promontories of Alp and Apennine, are only instances of Turner's management of the lower and softer hills. In the bolder examples of his powers, where he is dealing with lifted ma.s.ses of enormous mountain, we shall still find him as cautious in his use of violent slopes or vertical lines, and still as studied in his expression of retiring surface. We never get to the top of one of his hills without being tired with our walk; not by the steepness, observe, but by the stretch; for we are carried up towards the heaven by such delicate gradation of line, that we scarcely feel that we have left the earth before we find ourselves among the clouds. The Skiddaw, in the ill.u.s.trations to Scott, is a n.o.ble instance of this majestic moderation.

The mountain lies in the morning light, like a level vapor; its gentle lines of ascent are scarcely felt by the eye; it rises without effort or exertion, by the mightiness of its ma.s.s; every slope is full of slumber; and we know not how it has been exalted, until we find it laid as a floor for the walking of the eastern clouds. So again in the Fort Augustus, where the whole elevation of the hills depends on the soft lines of swelling surface which undulate back through leagues of mist carrying us unawares higher and higher above the diminished lake, until, when we are all but exhausted with the endless distance, the mountains make their last spring, and bear us, in that instant of exertion, half way to heaven.

-- 24. The peculiar difficulty of investigating the more essential truths of hill outline.

I ought perhaps rather to have selected, as instances of mountain form, such elaborate works as the Oberwesel or Lake of Uri, but I have before expressed my dislike of speaking of such magnificent pictures as these by parts. And indeed all proper consideration of the hill drawing of Turner must be deferred until we are capable of testing it by the principles of beauty; for, after all, the most essential qualities of line,--those on which all right delineation of mountain character must depend, are those which are only to be explained or ill.u.s.trated by appeals to our feeling of what is beautiful. There is an expression and a feeling about all the hill lines of nature, which I think I shall be able, hereafter, to explain; but it is not to be reduced to line and rule--not to be measured by angles or described by compa.s.ses--not to be chipped out by the geologist, or equated by the mathematician. It is intangible, incalculable--a thing to be felt, not understood--to be loved, not comprehended--a music of the eyes, a melody of the heart, whose truth is known only by its sweetness.

-- 25. Works of other modern artists. Clarkson Stanfield.

-- 26. Importance of particular and individual truth in hill drawing.

I can scarcely, without repeating myself to tediousness, enter at present into proper consideration of the mountain drawing of other modern painters. We have, fortunately, several by whom the n.o.ble truths which we have seen so fully exemplified by Turner are also deeply felt and faithfully rendered; though there is a necessity, for the perfect statement of them, of such an unison of freedom of thought with perfect mastery over the greatest mechanical difficulties, as we can scarcely hope to see attained by more than one man in our age. Very nearly the same words which we used in reference to Stanfield's drawings of the central clouds, might be applied to his rendering of mountain truth. He occupies exactly the same position with respect to other artists in earth as in cloud. None can be said really to _draw_ the mountain as he will, to have so perfect a mastery over its organic development; but there is, nevertheless, in all his works, some want of feeling and individuality. He has studied and mastered his subject to the bottom, but he trusts too much to that past study, and rather invents his hills from his possessed stores of knowledge, than expresses in them the fresh ideas received from nature. Hence, in all that he does, we feel a little too much that the hills are his own. We cannot swear to their being the particular crags and individual promontories which break the cone of Ischia, or shadow the waves of Maggiore. We are nearly sure, on the contrary, that nothing but the outline is local, and that all the filling up has been done in the study. Now, we have already shown (Sect.

I. Chap. III.) that particular truths are more important than general ones, and this is just one of the cases in which that rule especially applies. Nothing is so great a sign of truth and beauty in mountain drawing as the appearance of individuality--nothing is so great a proof of real imagination and invention, as the appearance that nothing has been imagined or invented. We ought to feel of every inch of mountain, that it _must_ have existence in reality, that if we had lived near the place we should have known every crag of it, and that there must be people to whom every crevice and shadow of the picture is fraught with recollections, and colored with a.s.sociations. The moment the artist can make us feel this--the moment he can make us think that _he_ has done nothing, that nature has done all--that moment he becomes enn.o.bled, he proves himself great. As long as we remember him, we cannot respect him.

We honor him most when we most forget him. He becomes great when he becomes invisible. And we may, perhaps, be permitted to express our hope that Mr. Stanfield will--our conviction that he must--if he would advance in his rank as an artist, attend more to local character, and give us generally less of the Stanfield limestone. He ought to study with greater attention the rocks which afford finer divisions and more delicate parts (slates and gneiss;) and he ought to observe more fondly and faithfully those beautiful laws and lines of swell and curvature, by intervals of which nature sets off and relieves the energy of her peaked outlines. He is at present apt to be too rugged, and, in consequence, to lose size. Of his best manner of drawing hills, I believe I can scarcely give a better example than the rocks of Suli, engraved in Finden's ill.u.s.trations to Byron. It is very grand and perfect in all parts and points.

-- 27. Works of Copley Fielding. His hill feeling.

Copley Fielding is peculiarly graceful and affectionate in his drawing of the inferior mountains. But as with his clouds so with his hills; as long as he keeps to silvery films of misty outline, or purple shadows mingled with the evening light, he is true and beautiful; but the moment he withdraws the ma.s.s out of its veiling mystery, he is lost. His worst drawings, therefore, are those on which he has spent most time; for he is sure to show weakness wherever he gives detail. We believe that all his errors proceed, as we observed before, from his not working with the chalk or pencil; and that if he would paint half the number of pictures in the year which he usually produces, and spend his spare time in hard dry study of forms, the half he painted would be soon worth double the present value of all. For he really has deep and genuine feeling of hill character--a far higher perception of s.p.a.ce, elevation, incorporeal color, and all those qualities which are the poetry of mountains, than any other of our water-color painters; and it is an infinite pity that he should not give to these delicate feelings the power of realization, which might be attained by a little labor. A few thorough studies of his favorite mountains, Ben-Venue or Ben-Cruachan, in clear, strong, front chiaroscuro, allowing himself neither color nor mist, nor any means of getting over the ground but downright drawing, would, we think, open his eyes to sources of beauty of which he now takes no cognizance. He ought not, however, to repeat the same subjects so frequently, as the casting about of the mind for means of varying them blunts the feelings to truth. And he should remember that an artist, who is not making progress, is nearly certain to be retrograding; and that progress is not to be made by working in the study, or by mere labor bestowed on the repet.i.tion of unchanging conceptions.

-- 28. Works of J. D. Harding and others.

J. D. Harding would paint mountains very n.o.bly, if he made them of more importance in his compositions, but they are usually little more than backgrounds for his foliage or buildings; and it is his present system to make his backgrounds very slight. His color is very beautiful: indeed, both his and Fielding's are far more refined than Stanfield's.

We wish he would oftener take up some wild subject dependent for interest on its mountain forms alone, as we should antic.i.p.ate the highest results from his perfect drawing; and we think that such an exercise, occasionally gone completely through, would counteract a tendency which we perceive in his present distances, to become a little thin and cutting, if not incomplete.

The late G. Robson was a man most thoroughly acquainted with all the characteristics of our own island hills; and some of the outlines of John Varley showed very grand feeling of energy of form.

FOOTNOTES

[56] I have above exhausted all terms of vituperation, and probably disgusted the reader; and yet I have not spoken with enough severity: I know not any terms of blame that are bitter enough to chastise justly the mountain drawings of Salvator in the pictures of the Pitti Palace.

[57] Some terrific cuts and chasms of this kind occur on the north side of the Valais, from Sion to Briey. The torrent from the great Aletsch glacier descends through one of them. Elsewhere chasms may be found as narrow, but few so narrow and deep.

CHAPTER IV.

OF THE FOREGROUND.

We have now only to observe the close characteristics of the rocks and soils to which the large ma.s.ses of which we have been speaking, owe their ultimate characters.

-- 1. What rocks were the chief components of ancient landscape foreground.

We have already seen that there exists a marked distinction between those stratified rocks whose beds are amorphous and without subdivision, as many limestones and sandstones, and those which are divided by lines of lamination, as all slates. The last kind of rock is the more frequent in nature, and forms the greater part of all hill scenery; it has, however, been successfully grappled with by few, even of the moderns, except Turner; while there is no single example of any aim at it or thought of it among the ancients, whose foregrounds, as far as it is possible to guess at their intention through their concentrated errors, are chosen from among the tufa and travertin of the lower Apennines, (the ugliest as well as the least characteristic rocks of nature,) and whose larger features of rock scenery, if we look at them with a predetermination to find in them a resemblance of _something_, may be p.r.o.nounced at least liker the mountain limestone than anything else. I shall glance, therefore, at the general characters of these materials first, in order that we may be able to appreciate the fidelity of rock-drawing on which Salvator's reputation has been built.

-- 2. Salvator's limestones. The real characters of the rock. Its fractures and obtuseness of angles.

The ma.s.sive limestones separate generally into irregular blocks, tending to the form of cubes or parallelopipeds, and terminated by tolerably smooth planes. The weather, acting on the edges of these blocks, rounds them off; but the frost, which, while it cannot penetrate nor split the body of the stone, acts energetically on the angles, splits off the rounded fragments, and supplies sharp, fresh, and complicated edges.

Hence the angles of such blocks are usually marked by a series of steps and fractures, in which the peculiar character of the rock is most distinctly seen; the effect being increased in many limestones by the interposition of two or three thinner beds between the large strata of which the block has been a part; these thin laminae breaking easily, and supplying a number of fissures and lines at the edge of the detached ma.s.s. Thus, as a general principle, if a rock have character anywhere, it will be on the angle, and however even and smooth its great planes may be, it will usually break into variety where it turns a corner. In one of the most exquisite pieces of rock truth ever put on canvas, the foreground of the Napoleon in the Academy, 1842, this principle was beautifully exemplified in the complicated fractures of the upper angle just where it turned from the light, while the planes of the rock were varied only by the modulation they owed to the waves. It follows from this structure that the edges of all rock being partially truncated, first by large fractures, and then by the rounding of the fine edges of these by the weather, perpetually present _convex_ transitions from the light to the dark side, the planes of the rock almost always swelling a little _from_ the angle.

-- 3. Salvator's acute angles caused by the meeting of concave curves.

Now it will be found throughout the works of Salvator, that his most usual practice was to give a _concave_ sweep of the brush for his first expression of the dark side, leaving the paint darkest towards the light; by which daring and original method of procedure he has succeeded in covering his foregrounds with forms which approximate to those of drapery, of ribbons, of crushed c.o.c.ked hats, of locks of hair, of waves, leaves, or anything, 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.[58]

-- 4. Peculiar distinctness of light and shade in the rocks of nature.