Modern Painters Volume III Part 22

Old Barnard's towers are purple still, To those that gaze from Toller Hill; Distant and high the tower of Bowes Like steel upon the anvil glows; And Stanmore's ridge, behind that lay, Rich with the spoils of parting day, In crimson and in gold arrayed, Streaks yet awhile the closing shade; Then slow resigns to darkening heaven The tints which brighter hours had given Thus, aged men, full loth and slow, The vanities of life forego, And count their youthful follies o'er Till Memory lends her light no more."

That is, as far as I remember, one of the most finished pieces of sunset he has given; and it has a woful moral; yet one which, with Scott, is inseparable from the scene.

Hark, again:

"'Twere sweet to mark the setting day On Bourhope's lonely top decay; And, as it faint and feeble died On the broad lake and mountain's side, To say, 'Thus pleasures fade away; Youth, talents, beauty, thus decay, And leave us dark, forlorn, and grey.'"

And again, hear Bertram:

"Mine be the eve of tropic sun: With disk like battle target red, He rushes to his burning bed, Dyes the wide wave with b.l.o.o.d.y light, Then sinks at once; and all is night."

In all places of this kind, where a pa.s.sing thought is suggested by some external scene, that thought is at once a slight and sad one.

Scott's deeper moral sense is marked in the _conduct_ of his stories, and in casual reflections or exclamations arising out of their plot, and therefore sincerely uttered; as that of Marmion:

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!"

But the reflections which are founded, not on events, but on scenes, are, for the most part, shallow, partly insincere, and, as far as sincere, sorrowful. This habit of ineffective dreaming and moralizing over pa.s.sing scenes, of which the earliest type I know is given in Jaques, is, as aforesaid, usually the satisfaction made to our modern consciences for the want of a sincere acknowledgment of G.o.d in nature: and Shakspere has marked it as the characteristic of a mind "compact of jars" (Act II. Sc. VII., As You Like It). That description attaches but too accurately to all the moods which we have traced in the moderns generally, and in Scott as the first representative of them; and the question now is, what this love of landscape, so composed, is likely to lead us to, and what use can be made of it.

We began our investigation, it will be remembered, in order to determine whether landscape-painting was worth studying or not. We have now reviewed the three princ.i.p.al phases of temper in the civilized human race, and we find that landscape has been mostly disregarded by great men, or cast into a second place, until now; and that now it seems dear to us, partly in consequence of our faults, and partly owing to accidental circ.u.mstances, soon, in all likelihood, to pa.s.s away: and there seems great room for question still, whether our love of it is a permanent and healthy feeling, or only a healthy crisis in a generally diseased state of mind. If the former, society will for ever hereafter be affected by its results; and Turner, the first great landscape painter, must take a place in the history of nations corresponding in art accurately to that of Bacon in philosophy;--Bacon having first opened the study of the laws of material nature, when, formerly, men had thought only of the laws of human mind; and Turner having first opened the study of the aspect of material nature, when, before, men had thought only of the aspect of the human form. Whether, therefore, the love of landscape be trivial and transient, or important and permanent, it now becomes necessary to consider. We have, I think, data enough before us for the solution of the question, and we will enter upon it, accordingly, in the following chapter.

[84] Pre-Raphaelitism, of course, excepted, which is a new phase of art, in no wise considered in this chapter. Blake was sincere, but full of wild creeds, and somewhat diseased in brain.

[85] Of course this is only meant of the modern citizen or country gentleman, as compared with a citizen of Sparta or old Florence. I leave it to others to say whether the "neglect of the _art_ of war" may or may not, in a yet more fatal sense, be predicated of the English nation. War, _without_ art, we seem, with G.o.d's help, able still to wage n.o.bly.

[86] See David Copperfield, chap. lv. and lviii.

[87] Observe, I do not speak thus of metaphysics because I have no pleasure in them. When I speak contemptuously of philology, it may be answered me, that I am a bad scholar; but I cannot be so answered touching metaphysics, for every one conversant with such subjects may see that I have strong inclination that way, which would, indeed, have led me far astray long ago, if I had not learned also some use of my hands, eyes, and feet.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE MORAL OF LANDSCAPE.

-- 1. SUPPOSING then the preceding conclusions correct, respecting the grounds and component _elements_ of the pleasure which the moderns take in landscape, we have here to consider what are the probable or usual _effects_ of this pleasure. Is it a safe or a seductive one? May we wisely boast of it, and unhesitatingly indulge it? or is it rather a sentiment to be despised when it is slight, and condemned when it is intense; a feeling which disinclines us to labor, and confuses us in thought; a joy only to the inactive and the visionary, incompatible with the duties of life, and the accuracies of reflection?

-- 2. It seems to me that, as matters stand at present, there is considerable ground for the latter opinion. We saw, in the preceding chapter, that our love of nature had been partly forced upon us by mistakes in our social economy, and led to no distinct issues of action or thought. And when we look to Scott--the man who feels it most deeply--for some explanation of its effect upon him, we find a curious tone of apology (as if for involuntary folly) running through his confessions of such sentiment, and a still more curious inability to define, beyond a certain point, the character of this emotion. He has lost the company of his friends among the hills, and turns to these last for comfort. He says, "there is a pleasure in the pain" consisting in such thoughts

"As oft awake By lone St. Mary's silent lake;"

but, when we look for some definition of these thoughts, all that we are told is, that they compose

"A mingled sentiment Of resignation and content!"[88]

a sentiment which, I suppose, many people can attain to on the loss of their friends, without the help of lakes or mountains; while Wordsworth definitely and positively affirms that _thought_ has nothing whatever to do with the matter, and that though, in his youth, the cataract and wood "haunted him like a pa.s.sion," it was without the help of any "remoter charm, by thought supplied."

-- 3. There is not, however, any question, but that both Scott and Wordsworth are here mistaken in their a.n.a.lysis of their feelings.

Their delight, so far from being without thought, is more than half made up of thought, but of thought in so curiously languid and neutralized a condition that they cannot trace it. The thoughts are beaten to a powder so small that they know not what they are; they know only that in such a state they are not good for much, and disdain to call them thoughts. But the way in which thought, even thus broken, acts in producing the delight will be understood by glancing back to ---- 9. and 10. of the tenth chapter, in which we observed the power of the imagination in exalting any visible object, by gathering round it, in farther vision, all the facts properly connected with it; this being, as it were, a spiritual or second sight, multiplying the power of enjoyment according to the fulness of the vision. For, indeed, although in all lovely nature there is, first, an excellent degree of simple beauty, addressed to the eye alone, yet often what impresses us most will form but a very small portion of that visible beauty. That beauty may, for instance, be composed of lovely flowers and glittering streams, and blue sky, and white clouds; and yet the thing that impresses us most, and which we should be sorriest to lose, may be a thin grey film on the extreme horizon, not so large, in the s.p.a.ce of the scene it occupies, as a piece of gossamer on a near at hand bush, nor in any wise prettier to the eye than the gossamer; but, because the gossamer is known by us for a little bit of spider's work, and the other grey film is known to mean a mountain ten thousand feet high, inhabited by a race of n.o.ble mountaineers, we are solemnly impressed by the aspect of it; and yet, all the while the thoughts and knowledge which cause us to receive this impression are so obscure that we are not conscious of them; we think we are only enjoying the visible scene; and the very men whose minds are fullest of such thoughts absolutely deny, as we have just heard, that they owe their pleasure to anything but the eye, or that the pleasure consists in anything else than "Tranquillity."

-- 4. And observe, farther, that this comparative Dimness and Untraceableness of the thoughts which are the sources of our admiration, is not a _fault_ in the thoughts, at such a time. It is, on the contrary, a necessary condition of their subordination to the pleasure of Sight. If the thoughts were more distinct we should not _see_ so well; and beginning definitely to think, we must comparatively cease to see. In the instance just supposed, as long as we look at the film of mountain or Alp, with only an obscure consciousness of its being the source of mighty rivers, that consciousness adds to our sense of its sublimity; and if we have ever seen the Rhine or the Rhone near their mouths, our knowledge, so long as it is only obscurely suggested, adds to our admiration of the Alp; but once let the idea define itself,--once let us begin to consider seriously _what_ rivers flow from that mountain, to trace their course, and to recall determinately our memories of their distant aspects,--and we cease to behold the Alp; or, if we still behold it, it is only as a point in a map which we are painfully designing, or as a subordinate object which we strive to thrust aside, in order to make room for our remembrances of Avignon or Rotterdam.

Again: so long as our idea of the mult.i.tudes who inhabit the ravines at its foot remains indistinct, that idea comes to the aid of all the other a.s.sociations which increase our delight. But let it once arrest us, and entice us to follow out some clear course of thought respecting the causes of the prosperity or misfortune of the Alpine villagers, and the snowy peak again ceases to be visible, or holds its place only as a white spot upon the retina, while we pursue our meditations upon the religion or the political economy of the mountaineers.

-- 5. It is thus evident that a curiously balanced condition of the powers of mind is necessary to induce full admiration of any natural scene. Let those powers be themselves inert, and the mind vacant of knowledge, and dest.i.tute of sensibility, and the external object becomes little more to us than it is to birds or insects; we fall into the temper of the clown. On the other hand, let the reasoning powers be shrewd in excess, the knowledge vast, or sensibility intense, and it will go hard but that the visible object will suggest so much that it shall be soon itself forgotten, or become, at the utmost, merely a kind of key-note to the course of purposeful thought. Newton, probably, did not perceive whether the apple which suggested his meditations on gravity was withered or rosy; nor could Howard be affected by the picturesqueness of the architecture which held the sufferers it was his occupation to relieve.

-- 6. This wandering away in thought from the thing seen to the business of life, is not, however, peculiar to men of the highest reasoning powers, or most active benevolence. It takes place more or less in nearly all persons of average mental endowment. They see and love what is beautiful, but forget their admiration of it in following some train of thought which it suggested, and which is of more personal interest to them. Suppose that three or four persons come in sight of a group of pine-trees, not having seen pines for some time. One, perhaps an engineer, is struck by the manner in which their roots hold the ground, and sets himself to examine their fibres, in a few minutes retaining little more consciousness of the beauty of the trees than if he were a rope-maker untwisting the strands of a cable: to another, the sight of the trees calls up some happy a.s.sociation, and presently he forgets them, and pursues the memories they summoned: a third is struck by certain groupings of their colors, useful to him as an artist, which he proceeds immediately to note mechanically for future use, with as little feeling as a cook setting down the const.i.tuents of a newly discovered dish; and a fourth, impressed by the wild coiling of boughs and roots, will begin to change them in his fancy into dragons and monsters, and lose his grasp of the scene in fantastic metamorphosis: while, in the mind of the man who has most the power of contemplating the thing itself, all these perceptions and trains of idea are partially present, not distinctly, but in a mingled and perfect harmony. He will not see the colors of the tree so well as the artist, nor its fibres so well as the engineer; he will not altogether share the emotion of the sentimentalist, nor the trance of the idealist; but fancy, and feeling, and perception, and imagination, will all obscurely meet and balance themselves in him, and he will see the pine-trees somewhat in this manner:

"Worthier still of note Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale, Joined in one solemn and capacious grove; Huge trunks! and each particular trunk a growth Of intertwisted fibres serpentine Up-coiling, and inveterately convolved; Nor uniformed with Phantasy, and looks That threaten the profane; a pillared shade, Upon whose gra.s.sless floor of red-brown hue, By sheddings from the pining umbrage tinged Perennially,--beneath whose sable roof Of boughs, as if for festal purpose, decked With unrejoicing berries, ghostly Shapes May meet at noontide; Fear and trembling Hope, Silence and Foresight; Death the Skeleton, And Time the Shadow; there to celebrate, As in a natural temple scattered o'er With altars undisturbed of mossy stone, United worship."

-- 7. The power, therefore, of thus fully _perceiving_ any natural object depends on our being able to group and fasten all our fancies about it as a centre, making a garland of thoughts for it, in which each separate thought is subdued and shortened of its own strength, in order to fit it for harmony with others; the intensity of our enjoyment of the object depending, first, on its own beauty, and then on the richness of the garland. And men who have this habit of cl.u.s.tering and harmonizing their thoughts are a little too apt to look scornfully upon the harder workers who tear the bouquet to pieces to examine the stems. This was the chief narrowness of Wordsworth's mind; he could not understand that to break a rock with a hammer in search of crystal may sometimes be an act not disgraceful to human nature, and that to dissect a flower may sometimes be as proper as to dream over it; whereas all experience goes to teach us, that among men of average intellect the most useful members of society are the dissectors, not the dreamers. It is not that they love nature or beauty less, but that they love result, effect, and progress more; and when we glance broadly along the starry crowd of benefactors to the human race, and guides of human thought, we shall find that this dreaming love of natural beauty--or at least its expression--has been more or less checked by them all, and subordinated either to hard work or watching of _human_ nature. Thus in all the cla.s.sical and mediaeval periods, it was, as we have seen, subordinate to agriculture, war, and religion; and in the modern period, in which it has become far more powerful, observe in what persons it is chiefly manifested.

(1.) It is subordinate in (2.) It is intense in Bacon. Mrs. Radclyffe.

Milton. St. Pierre.

Johnson. Shenstone.

Richardson. Byron.

Goldsmith. Sh.e.l.ley.

Young. Keats.

Newton. Burns.

Howard. Eugene Sue.

Fenelon. George Sand.

Pascal. Dumas.

-- 8. I have purposely omitted the names of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Scott, in the second list, because, glancing at the two columns as they now stand, we may, I think, draw some useful conclusions from the high honorableness and dignity of the names on one side, and the comparative slightness of those on the other,--conclusions which may help us to a better understanding of Scott and Tennyson themselves.

Glancing, I say, down those columns in their present form, we shall at once perceive that the intense love of nature is, in modern times, characteristic of persons not of the first order of intellect, but of brilliant imagination, quick sympathy, and undefined religious principle, suffering also usually under strong and ill-governed pa.s.sions: while in the same individual it will be found to vary at different periods, being, for the most part, strongest in youth, and a.s.sociated with force of emotion, and with indefinite and feeble powers of thought; also, throughout life, perhaps developing itself most at times when the mind is slightly unhinged by love, grief, or some other of the pa.s.sions.

-- 9. But, on the other hand, while these feelings of delight in natural objects cannot be construed into signs of the highest mental powers, or purest moral principles, we see that they are a.s.suredly indicative of minds above the usual standard of power, and endowed with sensibilities of great preciousness to humanity; so that those who find themselves entirely dest.i.tute of them, must make this want a subject of humiliation, not of pride. The apathy which cannot perceive beauty is very different from the stern energy which disdains it; and the coldness of heart which receives no emotion from external nature, is not to be confounded with the wisdom of purpose which represses emotion in action. In the case of most men, it is neither acuteness of the reason, nor breadth of humanity, which shields them from the impressions of natural scenery, but rather low anxieties, vain discontents, and mean pleasures; and for one who is blinded to the works of G.o.d by profound abstraction or lofty purpose, tens of thousands have their eyes sealed by vulgar selfishness, and their intelligence crushed by impious care.

Observe, then: we have, among mankind in general, the three orders of being;--the lowest, sordid and selfish, which neither sees nor feels; the second, n.o.ble and sympathetic, but which sees and feels without concluding or acting; the third and highest, which loses sight in resolution, and feeling in work.[89]

Thus, even in Scott and Wordsworth themselves, the love of nature is more or less a.s.sociated with their weaknesses. Scott shows it most in the cruder compositions of his youth, his perfect powers of mind being displayed only in dialogues with which description has nothing whatever to do. Wordsworth's distinctive work was a war with pomp and pretence, and a display of the majesty of simple feelings and humble hearts, together with high reflective truth in his a.n.a.lysis of the courses of politics and ways of men; without these, his love of nature would have been comparatively worthless.

-- 10. "If this be so, it is not well to encourage the observance of landscape, any more than other ways of dreamily and ineffectually spending time?"

Stay a moment. We have hitherto observed this love of natural beauty only as it distinguishes one man from another, not as it acts for good or evil on those minds to which it necessarily belongs. It may, on the whole, distinguish weaker men from stronger men, and yet in those weaker men may be of some notable use. It may distinguish Byron from St. Bernard, and Sh.e.l.ley from Sir Isaac Newton, and yet may, perhaps, be the best thing that Byron and Sh.e.l.ley possess--a saving element in them; just as a rush may be distinguished from an oak by its bending, and yet the bending may be the saving element in the rush, and an admirable gift in its place and way. So that, although St. Bernard journeys all day by the Lake of Geneva, and asks at evening "where it is," and Byron learns by it "to love earth only for its earthly sake,"[90] it does not follow that Byron, hating men, was the worse for loving the earth, nor that St.

Bernard, loving men, was the better or wiser for being blind to it.

And this will become still more manifest if we examine somewhat farther into the nature of this instinct, as characteristic especially of youth.

-- 11. We saw above that Wordsworth described the feeling as independent of thought, and, in the particular place then quoted, he _therefore_ speaks of it depreciatingly. But in other places he does not speak of it depreciatingly, but seems to think the absence of thought involves a certain n.o.bleness:

"In such high hour Of visitation from the living G.o.d _Thought_ was not."

And he refers to the intense delight which he himself felt, and which he supposes other men feel, in nature, during their thoughtless youth, as an intimation of their immortality, and a joy which indicates their having come fresh from the hand of G.o.d.

Now, if Wordsworth be right in supposing this feeling to be in some degree common to all men, and most vivid in youth, we may question if it can be _entirely_ explained as I have now tried to explain it. For if it entirely depended on mult.i.tudes of ideas, cl.u.s.tering about a beautiful object, it might seem that the youth could not feel it so strongly as the man, because the man knows more, and must have more ideas to make the garland of. Still less can we suppose the pleasure to be of that melancholy and languid kind, which Scott defines as "Resignation" and "Content;" boys being not distinguished for either of those characters, but for eager effort and delightsome discontent.

If Wordsworth is at all right in this matter, therefore, there must surely be some other element in the feeling not yet detected.

-- 12. Now, in a question of this subtle kind, relating to a period of life when self-examination is rare, and expression imperfect, it becomes exceedingly difficult to trace, with any certainty, the movements of the minds of others, nor always easy to remember those of our own. I cannot, from observation, form any decided opinion as to the extent in which this strange delight in nature influences the hearts of young persons in general; and, in stating what has pa.s.sed in my own mind, I do not mean to draw any positive conclusion as to the nature of the feeling in other children; but the inquiry is clearly one in which personal experience is the only safe ground to go upon, though a narrow one; and I will make no excuse for talking about myself with reference to this subject, because, though there is much egotism in the world, it is often the last thing a man thinks of doing,--and, though there is much work to be done in the world, it is often the best thing a man can do,--to tell the exact truth about the movements of his own mind; and there is this farther reason, that, whatever other faculties I may or may not possess, this gift of taking pleasure in landscape I a.s.suredly possess in a greater degree than most men; it having been the ruling pa.s.sion of my life, and the reason for the choice of its field of labor.