Modern Painters Volume III Part 9

The Netherlands work is, on the whole, the worst; because, in its ridiculous double lines, it adds affectation and conceit to its incapacity. But in all these cases the engravers have worked in total ignorance both of what is meant by "drawing," and of the form of a tree, covering their paper with certain lines, which they have been taught to plough in copper, as a husbandman ploughs in clay.

-- 9. In the next three examples we have instances of endeavors at finish by the hands of artists themselves, marking three stages of knowledge or insight, and three relative stages of finish. Fig. 7.

is Claude's (Liber Veritatis, No. 140., facsimile by Boydell). It still displays an appalling ignorance of the forms of trees, but yet is, in mode of execution, better--that is, more finished--than the engravings, because not _altogether_ mechanical, and showing some dim, far-away, blundering memory of a few facts in stems, such as their variations of texture and roundness, and bits of young shoots of leaves. 8. is Salvator's, facsimiled from part of his original etching of the Finding of Oedipus. It displays considerable power of handling--not mechanical, but free and firm, and is just so much more finished than any of the others as it displays more intelligence about the way in which boughs gather themselves out of the stem, and about the varying character of their curves. Finally, fig. 9. is good work. It is the root of the apple-tree in Albert Durer's Adam and Eve, and fairly represents the wrinkles of the bark, the smooth portions emergent beneath, and the general anatomy of growth. All the lines used conduce to the representation of these facts; and the work is therefore highly finished. It still, however, leaves out, as not to be represented by such kind of lines, the more delicate gradations of light and shade. I shall now "finish" a little farther, in the next plate (3.), the mere _insertion of the two boughs_ outlined in fig. 1. I do this simply by adding a.s.sertions of more facts. First, I say that the whole trunk is dark, as compared with the distant sky. Secondly, I say that it is rounded by gradations of shadow, in the various forms shown. And, lastly, I say that (this being a bit of old pine stripped by storm of its bark) the wood is fissured in certain directions, showing its grain, or _muscle_, seen in complicated contortions at the insertion of the arm and elsewhere.

-- 10. Now this piece of work, though yet far from complete (we will better it presently), is yet more finished than any of the others, not because it is more delicate or more skilful, but simply because it tells more truth, and admits fewer fallacies. That which conveys most information, with least inaccuracy, is always the highest finish; and the question whether we prefer art so finished, to art unfinished, is not one of taste at all. It is simply a question whether we like to know much or little; to see accurately or see falsely; and those whose _taste_ in art (if they choose so to call it) leads them to like blindness better than sight, and fallacy better than fact, would do well to set themselves to some other pursuit than that of art.

-- 11. In the above plate we have examined chiefly the grain and surface of the boughs; we have not yet noticed the finish of their curvature. If the reader will look back to the No. 7. (Plate 2.), which, in this respect, is the worst of all the set, he will immediately observe the exemplification it gives of Claude's princ.i.p.al theory about trees; namely, that the boughs always parted from each other, two at a time, in the manner of the p.r.o.ngs of an ill-made table-fork. It may, perhaps, not be at once believed that this is indeed Claude's theory respecting tree-structure, without some farther examples of his practice. I have, therefore, a.s.sembled on the next page, Plate 4., some of the most characteristic pa.s.sages of ramification in the Liber Veritatis; the plates themselves are sufficiently cheap (as they should be) and accessible to nearly every one, so that the accuracy of the facsimiles may be easily tested. I have given in Appendix I. the numbers of the plates from which the examples are taken, and it will be found that they have been rather improved than libelled, only omitting, of course, the surrounding leaf.a.ge, in order to show accurately the branch-outlines, with which alone we are at present concerned. And it would be difficult to bring together a series more totally futile and foolish, more singularly wrong (as the false griffin was), every way at once; they are stiff, and yet have no strength; curved, and yet have no flexibility; monotonous, and yet disorderly; unnatural, and yet uninventive. They are, in fact, of that commonest kind of tree bough which a child or beginner first draws experimentally; nay, I am well a.s.sured, that if this set of branches had been drawn by a schoolboy, "out of his own head," his master would hardly have cared to show them as signs of any promise in him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 3. Strength of Old Pine.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 4. Ramification, according to Claude.]

-- 12. "Well, but do not the trunks of trees fork, and fork mostly into two arms at a time?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 2.]

Yes; but under as stern anatomical law as the limbs of an animal; and those hooked junctions in Plate 4. are just as accurately representative of the branching of wood as this (fig. 2.) is of a neck and shoulders. We should object to such a representation of shoulders, because we have some interest in, and knowledge of, human form; we do not object to Claude's trees, because we have no interest in, nor knowledge of, trees. And if it be still alleged that such work is nevertheless enough to give any one an "idea" of a tree, I answer that it never gave, nor ever will give, an idea of a tree to any one who loves trees; and that, moreover, no idea, whatever its pleasantness, is of the smallest value, which is not founded on simple facts. What pleasantness may be in _wrong_ ideas we do not here inquire; the only question for us has always been, and must always be, What are the facts?

-- 13. And a.s.suredly those boughs of Claude's are not facts: and every one of their contours is, in the worst sense, unfinished, without even the expectation or faint hope of possible refinement ever coming into them. I do not mean to enter here into the discussion of the characters of ramification; that must be in our separate inquiry into tree-structure generally; but I will merely give one piece of Turner's tree-drawing as an example of what finished work really is, even in outline. In plate 5. opposite, fig. 1. is the contour (stripped, like Claude's, of its foliage) of one of the distant tree-stems in the drawing of Bolton Abbey. In order to show its perfectness better by contrast with bad work (as we have had, I imagine, enough of Claude), I will take a bit of Constable; fig. 2. is the princ.i.p.al tree out of the engraving of the Lock on the Stour (Leslie's Life of Constable). It differs from the Claude outlines merely in being the kind of work which is produced by an uninventive person dashing about idly, with a brush, instead of drawing determinately wrong, with a pen: on the one hand worse than Claude's, in being lazier; on the other a little better in being more free, but, as representative of tree-form, of course still wholly barbarous. It is worth while to turn back to the description of the uninventive painter at work on a tree (Vol. II.

chapter on Imaginative a.s.sociation, -- 11), for this trunk of Constable's is curiously ill.u.s.trative of it. One can almost see him, first bending it to the right; then, having gone long enough to the right, turning to the left; then, having gone long enough to the left, away to the right again; then dividing it; and "because there is another tree in the picture with two long branches (in this case there really is), he knows that this ought to have three or four, which must undulate or go backwards and forwards," &c., &c.

-- 14. Then study the bit of Turner work: note first its quietness, unattractiveness, apparent carelessness whether you look at it or not; next note the subtle curvatures within the narrowest limits, and, when it branches, the unexpected, out of the way things it does, just what n.o.body could have thought of its doing; shooting out like a letter Y, with a nearly straight branch, and then correcting its stiffness with a zigzag behind, so that the boughs, ugly individually, are beautiful in unison. (In what I have hereafter to say about trees, I shall need to dwell much on this character of _unexpectedness_. A bough is never drawn rightly if it is not wayward, so that although, as just now said, quiet at first, not caring to be looked at, the moment it is looked at, it seems bent on astonishing you, and doing the last things you expect it to do.) But our present purpose is only to note the _finish_ of the Turner _curves_, which, though they seem straight and stiff at first, are, when you look long, seen to be all tremulous, perpetually wavering along every edge into endless melody of change.

This is finish in line, in exactly the same sense that a fine melody is finished in the a.s.sociation of its notes.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 5. Good and Bad Tree-Drawing.]

-- 15. And now, farther, let us take a little bit of the Turnerian tree in light and shade. I said above I would better the drawing of that pine trunk, which, though it has incipient shade, and muscular action, has no texture, nor local color. Now, I take about an inch and a half of Turner's ash trunks (one of the nearer ones) in this same drawing of Bolton Abbey (fig. 3. Plate 5.), and _this_ I cannot better; this is perfectly finished; it is not possible to add more truth to it on that scale. Texture of bark, anatomy of muscle beneath, reflected lights in recessed hollows, stains of dark moss, and flickering shadows from the foliage above, all are there, as clearly as the human hand can mark them. I place a bit of trunk by Constable (fig. 5.),[41]

from another plate in Leslie's Life of him (a dell in Helmingham Park, Suffolk), for the sake of the same comparison in shade that we have above in contour. You see Constable does not know whether he is drawing moss or shadow: those dark touches in the middle are confused in his mind between the dark stains on the trunk and its dark side; there is no anatomy, no cast shadow, nothing but idle sweeps of the brush, vaguely circular. The thing is much darker than Turner's, but it is not, therefore, finished; it is only blackened. And "to blacken"

is indeed the proper word for all attempts at finish without knowledge. All true finish is _added fact_; and Turner's word for finishing a picture was always this significant one, "carry forward."

But labor without added knowledge can only blacken or stain a picture, it cannot finish it.

-- 16. And this is especially to be remembered as we pa.s.s from comparatively large and distant objects, such as this single trunk, to the more divided and nearer features of foreground. Some degree of ignorance may be hidden, in completing what is far away; but there is no concealment possible in close work, and darkening instead of finishing becomes then the engraver's only possible resource. It has always been a wonderful thing to me to hear people talk of making foregrounds "vigorous," "marked," "forcible," and so on. If you will lie down on your breast on the next bank you come to (which is bringing it _close_ enough, I should think, to give it all the force it is capable of), you will see, in the cl.u.s.ter of leaves and gra.s.s close to your face, something as delicate as this, which I have actually so drawn, on the opposite page, a mystery of soft shadow in the depths of the gra.s.s, with indefinite forms of leaves, which you cannot trace or count, within it, and out of that, the nearer leaves coming in every subtle gradation of tender light and flickering form, quite beyond all delicacy of pencilling to follow; and yet you will rise up from that bank (certainly not making it appear coa.r.s.er by drawing a little back from it), and profess to represent it by a few blots of "forcible" foreground color. "Well, but I cannot draw every leaf that I see on the bank." No, for as we saw, at the beginning of this chapter, that no human work could be finished so as to express the _delicacy_ of nature, so neither can it be finished so as to express the _redundance_ of nature. Accept that necessity; but do not deny it; do not call your work finished, when you have, in engraving, subst.i.tuted a confusion of coa.r.s.e black scratches, or in water-color a few edgy blots, for ineffable organic beauty. Follow that beauty as far as you can, remembering that just as far as you see, know, and represent it, just so far your work is finished; as far as you fall short of it, your work is _un_finished; and as far as you subst.i.tute any other thing for it, your work is spoiled.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 6. Foreground Leaf.a.ge.]

-- 17. How far Turner followed it, is not easily shown; for his finish is so delicate as to be nearly uncopiable. I have just said it was not possible to finish that ash trunk of his, farther, on such a scale.[42] By using a magnifying-gla.s.s, and giving the same help to the spectator, it might perhaps be possible to add and exhibit a few more details; but even as it is, I cannot by line engraving express all that there is in that piece of tree-trunk, on the same scale. I _have_ therefore magnified the upper part of it in fig 4. (Plate 5.), so that the reader may better see the beautiful lines of curvature into which even its slightest shades and spots are cast. Every quarter of an inch in Turner's drawings will bear magnifying in the same way; much of the finer work in them can hardly be traced, except by the keenest sight, until it is magnified. In his painting of Ivy Bridge,[43] the veins are drawn on the wings of a b.u.t.terfly, not above three lines in diameter; and in one of his smaller drawings of Scarborough, in my own possession, the muscle-sh.e.l.ls on the beach are rounded, and some shown as shut, some as open, though none are as large as one of the letters of this type; and yet this is the man who was thought to belong to the "dashing" school, literally because most people had not patience or delicacy of sight enough to trace his endless detail.

-- 18. "Suppose it was so," perhaps the reader replies; "still I do not like detail so delicate that it can hardly be seen." Then you like nothing in Nature (for you will find she always carries her detail too far to be traced). This point, however, we shall examine hereafter; it is not the question now whether we _like_ finish or not; our only inquiry here is, what finish _means_; and I trust the reader is beginning to be satisfied that it does indeed mean nothing but consummate and acc.u.mulated truth, and that our old monotonous test must still serve us here as elsewhere. And it will become us to consider seriously why (if indeed it be so) we dislike this kind of finish--dislike an acc.u.mulation of truth. For a.s.suredly all authority is against us, and _no truly great man can be named in the arts--but it is that of one who finished to his utmost_. Take Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael for a triad, to begin with.

_They_ all completed their detail with such subtlety of touch and gradation, that, in a careful drawing by any of the three, you cannot see where the pencil ceased to touch the paper; the stroke of it is so tender, that, when you look close to the drawing you can see nothing; you only see the effect of it a little way back! Thus tender in execution,--and so complete in detail, that Leonardo must needs draw _every several vein in the little agates_ and pebbles of the gravel under the feet of the St. Anne in the Louvre. Take a quartett after the triad--t.i.tian, Tintoret, Bellini, and Veronese.

Examine the vine-leaves of the Bacchus and Ariadne, (t.i.tian's) in the National Gallery; examine the borage blossoms, painted petal by petal, though lying loose on the table, in t.i.tian's Supper at Emmaus, in the Louvre, or the snail-sh.e.l.ls on the ground in his Entombment;[44] examine the separately designed patterns on every drapery of Veronese, in his Marriage in Cana; go to Venice and see how Tintoret paints the strips of black bark on the birch trunk that sustains the platform in his Adoration of the Magi: how Bellini fills the rents of his ruined walls with the most exquisite cl.u.s.ters of the erba della Madonna.[45] You will find them all in a tale.

Take a quintett after the quartett--Francia, Angelico, Durer, Hemling, Perugino,--and still the witness is one, still the same striving in all to such utmost perfection as their knowledge and hand could reach.

Who shall gainsay these men? Above all, who shall gainsay them when they and Nature say precisely the same thing? For where does Nature pause in _her_ finishing--that finishing which consists not in the smoothing of surface, but the filling of s.p.a.ce, and the multiplication of life and thought?

Who shall gainsay them? I, for one, dare not; but accept their teaching, with Nature's, in all humbleness.

"But is there, then, no good in any work which does not pretend to perfectness? Is there no saving clause from this terrible requirement of completion? And if there be none, what is the meaning of all you have said elsewhere about rudeness as the glory of Gothic work, and, even a few pages back, about the danger of finishing, for our modern workmen?"

Indeed there are many saving clauses, and there is much good in imperfect work. But we had better cast the consideration of these drawbacks and exceptions into another chapter, and close this one, without obscuring, in any wise, our broad conclusion that "finishing"

means in art simply "telling more truth;" and that whatever we have in any sort begun wisely, it is good to finish thoroughly.

[38] "With his Yemen sword for aid; Ornament it carried none, But the notches on the blade."

[39] See the base of the new Army and Navy Clubhouse.

[40] I take this example from Miller, because, on the whole, he is the best engraver of Turner whom we have.

[41] Fig. 5. is not, however, so _l.u.s.trous_ as Constable's; I cannot help this, having given the original plate to my good friend Mr. Cousen, with strict charge to facsimile it faithfully: but the figure is all the fairer, as a representation of Constable's art, for those mezzotints in Leslie's life of him have many qualities of drawing which are quite wanting in Constable's blots of color. The comparison shall be made elaborately, between picture and picture, in the section on Vegetation.

[42] It is of the exact size of the original, the whole drawing being about 15-1/2 inches by 11 in.

[43] An oil painting (about 3 ft. by 4 ft. 6 in.), and very broad in its ma.s.ses. In the possession of E. Bicknell, Esq.

[44] These snail-sh.e.l.ls are very notable, occurring as they do in, perhaps, the very grandest and broadest of all t.i.tian's compositions.

[45] Linaria Cymbalaria, the ivy-leaved toadflax of English gardens.

CHAPTER X.

OF THE USE OF PICTURES.

-- 1. I am afraid this will be a difficult chapter; one of drawbacks, qualifications, and exceptions. But the more I see of useful truths, the more I find that, like human beings, they are eminently biped; and, although, as far as apprehended by human intelligence, they are usually seen in a crane-like posture, standing on one leg, whenever they are to be stated so as to maintain themselves against all attack it is quite necessary they should stand on two, and have their complete balance on opposite fulcra.

-- 2. I doubt not that one objection, with which as well as with another we may begin, has struck the reader very forcibly, after comparing the ill.u.s.trations above given from Turner, Constable, and Claude. He will wonder how it was that Turner, finishing in this exquisite way, and giving truths by the thousand, where other painters gave only one or two, yet, of all painters, seemed to obtain least acknowledgeable resemblance to nature, so that the world cried out upon him for a madman, at the moment when he was giving exactly the highest and most consummate truth that had ever been seen in landscape.

And he will wonder why still there seems reason for this outcry.

Still, after what a.n.a.lysis and proof of his being right have as yet been given, the reader may perhaps be saying to himself: "All this reasoning is of no use to me. Turner does _not_ give me the idea of nature; I do not feel before one of his pictures as I should in the real scene. Constable takes me out into the shower, and Claude into the sun; and De Wint makes me feel as if I were walking in the fields; but Turner keeps me in the house, and I know always that I am looking at a picture."

I might answer to this; Well, what else _should_ he do? If you want to feel as if you were in a shower, cannot you go and get wet without help from Constable? If you want to feel as if you were walking in the fields, cannot you go and walk in them without help from De Wint? But if you want to sit in your room and look at a beautiful picture, why should you blame the artist for giving you one? This _was_ the answer actually made to me by various journalists, when first I showed that Turner was truer than other painters: "Nay," said they, "we do not want truth, we want something else than truth; we would not have nature, but something better than nature."

-- 3. I do not mean to accept that answer, although it seems at this moment to make for me: I have never accepted it. As I raise my eyes from the paper, to think over the curious mingling in it, of direct error, and far away truth, I see upon the room-walls, first, Turner's drawing of the chain of the Alps from the Superga above Turin; then a study of a block of gneiss at Chamouni, with the purple Aiguilles-Rouges behind it; another, of the towers of the Swiss Fribourg, with a cl.u.s.ter of pine forest behind them; then another Turner, Isola Bella, with the blue opening of the St.

Gothard in the distance; and then a fair bit of thirteenth century illumination, depicting, at the top of the page, the Salutation; and beneath, the painter who painted it, sitting in his little convent cell, with a legend above him to this effect--

"ego jah{ann}es sc{ri}psi hunc librum."

I, John, wrote this book.

None of these things are bad pieces of art; and yet,--if it were offered to me to have, instead of them, so many windows, out of which I should see, first, the real chain of the Alps from the Superga; then the real block of gneiss, and Aiguilles-Rouges; then the real towers of Fribourg, and pine forest; the real Isola Bella; and, finally, the true Mary and Elizabeth; and beneath them, the actual old monk at work in his cell,--I would very unhesitatingly change my five pictures for the five windows; and so, I apprehend, would most people, not, it seems to me, unwisely.

"Well, then," the reader goes on to question me, "the more closely the picture resembles such a window the better it must be?"

Yes.

"Then if Turner does not give me the impression of such a window, that is of Nature, there must be something wrong in Turner?"

Yes.