Chapter 16

Our graduate dismisses the "sublime" in about two pages; in fact, he considers sublimity not to be a specific term, nor "descriptive of the effect of a particular class of ideas;" but as he immediately asserts that it is "greatness of any kind," and "the effect of greatness upon the feelings," we should have expected to have heard a little more about what constitutes this "greatness," this "sublime," which "elevates the mind," something more than that "Burke's theory of the nature of the sublime is incorrect." The sublime not being "distinct from what is beautiful," he confines his subject to "ideas of truth, beauty, and relation," and by these he proposes to test all artists. Truth of facts and truth of thoughts are here considered; the first necessary, but the latter the highest: we should say that it is the latter which alone constitutes art, and that here art begins where nature ends. Facts are the foundation necessary to the superstructure; the foundation of which must be there, though unseen, unnoticed in contemplation of the noble edifice. Very great stress is laid upon "the exceeding importance of truth;" which none will question, reminding us of the commencement of Bacon's essay, "What is truth? said laughing Pilate, and would not wait for an answer." "Nothing," says our author, "can atone for the want of truth, not the most brilliant imagination, the most playful fancy, the most pure feeling (supposing that feeling _could_ be pure and false at the same time,) not the most exalted conception, nor the most comprehensive grasp of intellect, can make amends for the want of truth." Now, there is much parade in all this, surely truth, as such in reference to art, is _in_ the brilliancy of imagination, _in_ the playfulness, without which is no fancy, _in_ the feeling, and _in_ the very exaltation of a conception; and intellect has no _grasp_ that does not grasp a truth. When he speaks of nature as "immeasurably superior to all that the human mind can conceive," and professes to "pay no regard whatsoever to what may be thought beautiful, or sublime, or imaginative," and to "look only for truth, bare, clear downright statement of facts," he seems to forget what nature is, as adopted by, as taken into art; it is not only external nature, but external nature in conjunction with the human mind. Nor does he, in fact, adhere in the subsequent part of his work to this his declaration; for he loses it in his "fervour of imagination," when he actually examines the works of "the great living painter, who is, I believe, imagined by the majority of the public to paint more falsehood and less fact than any other known master." Here our author jumps at once into his monomania--his adoration of the works of Turner, which he examines largely and microscopically, as it suits his whim, and imagines all the while he is describing and examining nature; and not unfrequently he tells you, that nature and Turner are the same, and that he "invites the same ceaseless study as the works of nature herself." This is "coming it pretty strong." We confess we are with the majority--not that we wish to depreciate Turner. He is, or has been, unquestionably, a man of genius, and that is a great admission. He has, perhaps, done in art what never has been done before. He has illuminated "Views," if not with local, with a splendid truth. His views of towns are the finest; he led the way to this walk of art, and is far superior to all in it. We speak of his works collectively. Some of his earlier, more imaginative, were unquestionably poetical, though not, perhaps, of a very high character. We believe he has been better acquainted with many of the truths of nature, particularly those which came within the compass of his line of views, than any other artist, ancient or modern; but we believe he has neglected others, and some important ones too, and to which the old masters paid the greatest attention, and devoted the utmost study. We have spoken frequently, unhesitatingly, of the late extraordinary productions of his pencil, as altogether unworthy his real genius; it is in these we see, with the majority of the public, "more falsehood and less fact" than in any other known master--a defiance of the "known truths" in drawing, colour, and composition, for which we can only account upon the supposition, that his eye misrepresents to him the work of his hands. We see, in the almost adoration of his few admirers, that if it be difficult, and not always dependent, on merit to attain to eminence in the world's estimation, it is nearly as difficult altogether to fall from it; and that nothing the artist can do, though they be the veriest "ægri somnia," will separate from him habitual followers, who, with a zeal in proportion to the extravagances he may perpetrate, will lose their relish for, and depreciate the great masters, whose very principles he seems capriciously in his age to set aside, and they will from followers become his worshippers, and in pertinacity exact entire compliance, and assent to every, the silliest, dictation of their monomania. We subjoin a specimen of this kind of worship, which will be found fully to justify our observations, and which, considering it speaks of mortal man, is somewhat blaspheming Divine attributes; we know not really whether we should pity the condition of the author, or reprehend the passage. After speaking of other modern painters, who are so superior to the old, he says: "and Turner--glorious in conception--unfathomable in knowledge--solitary in power--with the elements waiting upon his will, and the night and the morning obedient to his call, sent as a prophet of God to reveal to men the mysteries of his universe, standing, like the great angel of the Apocalypse, clothed with a cloud, and with a rainbow upon his head, and with the sun and stars given into his hand." Little as we are disposed to laugh at any such aberrations, we must, to remove from our minds the greater, the more serious offence, indulge in a small degree of justifiable ridicule; and ask what will sculptor or painter make of this description, should the reluctant public be convinced by the "graduate," and in their penitential reverence order statue or painting of Mr Turner for the Temple of Fame, which it is presumed Parliament, in their artistic zeal, mean to erect? How will they venture to represent Mr Turner looking like an angel--in that dress which would make any man look like a fool--his cloud nightcap tied with rainbow riband round his head, calling to night and morning, and little caring which comes, making "ducks and drakes" of the sun and the stars, put into his hand for that purpose? We will only suggest one addition, as it completes the grand idea, and is in some degree characteristic of Mr Turner's peculiar execution, that, with the sun and stars, there should be delivered into his hand a comet, whose tail should serve him for a brush, and supply itself with colour. We do not see, however, why the moon should have been omitted; sun, moon, and stars, generally go together. Is the author as jealous as the "majority of the public" may be suspicious of her influence? And let not the reader believe that Mr Turner is thus called a prophet in mere joke, or a fashion of words--his prophetic power is advanced in another passage, wherein it is asserted that Mr Turner not only tells us in his works what nature has done in hers, but what she will do. "In fact," says our author, "the great quality about Mr Turner's drawings, which more especially proves their transcendant truth, is the capability they afford us of reasoning on past and future phenomena." The book teems with extravagant bombastic praise like this. Mr Turner is more than the Magnus Apollo. Yet other English artists are brought forward, immediately preceding the above panegyric; we know not if we do them justice, by noticing what is said of them. There is a curious description of David Cos lying on the ground "to possess his spirit in humility and peace," of Copley Fielding, as an aeronaut, "casting his whole soul into space." We really cannot follow him, "exulting like the wild deer in the motion of the swift mists," and "flying with the wild wind and sifted spray along the white driving desolate sea, with the passion for nature's freedom burning in his heart;" for such a chase and such a heart-burn must have a frightful termination, unless it be mere nightmare. We see "J. D. Harding, brilliant and vigorous," &c., "following with his quick, keen dash the sunlight into the crannies of the rocks, and the wind into the tangling of the grass, and the bright colour into the fall of the sea-foam--various, universal in his aim;" after which very fatiguing pursuit, we are happy to find him "under the shade of some spreading elm;" yet his heart is oak--and he is "English, all English at his heart." But Mr Clarkson Stanfield is a man of men--"firm, and fearless, and unerring in his knowledge--stern and decisive in his truth--perfect and certain in composition--shunning nothing, concealing nothing, and falsifying nothing--never affected, never morbid, never failing--conscious of his strength, but never ostentatious of it--acquainted with every line and hue of the deep sea--chiseling his waves with unhesitating knowledge of every curve of their anatomy, and every moment of their motion--building his mountains rock by rock, with wind in every fissure, and weight in every stone--and modeling the masses of his sky with the strength of tempest in their every fold." It is curious--yet a searcher after nature's truths ought to know, as he is here told, that waves may be anatomized, and must be _chiseled_, and that mountains are and ought to be _built_ up rock by rock, as a wall brick by brick; no easy task considering that there is a disagreeable "wind in every fissure, and weight in every stone"--and that the aerial sky, incapable to touch, must be "modeled in masses." All this is given after an equally extravagant abuse of Claude, of Salvator Rosa, and Poussin. He finds fault with Claude, because his sea does not "upset the flower-pots on the wall," forgetting that they are put there because the sea could not--with Salvator, for his "contemptible fragment of splintery crag, which an Alpine snow-wreath" (which would have no business there) "would smother in its first swell, with a stunted bush or two growing out of it, and a Dudley or Halifax-like volume of smoke for a sky"--with Poussin, for that he treats foliage (whereof "every bough is a revelation!") as "a black round mass of impenetrable paint, diverging into feathers instead of leaves, and supported on a stick instead of a trunk." A page or two from this, our author sadly abuses poor Canaletti, as far as we can see, for not painting a tumbled-down wall, which perhaps, in his day, was not in a ruinous state at all; it is a curious passage--and shows how much may be made out of a wall. Pyramus's chink was nothing to this--behold a specimen of "fine writing!" "Well: take the next house. We remember that too; it was mouldering inch by inch into the canal, and the bricks had fallen away from its shattered marble shafts, and left them white and skeleton-like, yet with their fretwork of cold flowers wreathed about them still, untouched by time; and through the rents of the wall behind them there used to come long sunbeams gleamed by the weeds through which they pierced, which flitted, and fell one by one round those grey and quiet shafts, catching here a leaf and there a leaf, and gliding over the illumined edges and delicate fissures until they sank into the deep dark hollow between the marble blocks of the sunk foundation, lighting every other moment one isolated emerald lamp on the crest of the intermittent waves, when the wild sea-weeds and crimson lichens drifted and crawled with their thousand colours and fine branches over its decay, and the black, clogging, accumulated limpets hung in ropy clusters from the dripping and tinkling stone. What has Canaletti given us for this?" Alas, neither a _crawling_ lichen, nor _clogging_ limpets, nor a _tinkling_ stone, but "one square, red mass, composed of--let me count--five-and-fifty--no, six-and-fifty--no, I was right at first, five-and-fifty bricks," &c. The picture, if it be painted by the graduate, must be a curiosity--we can make neither head nor tail of his words. But let us find another strange specimen--where he compares his own observations of nature with Poussin and Turner. Every one must remember a very pretty little picture of no great consequence by Gaspar Poussin--a view of some buildings of a town said to be Aricia, the modern La Riccia--just take it for what it is intended to be, a quiet, modest, agreeable scene--very true and sweetly painted. How unfit to be compared with an ambitious description of a combination of views from Rome to the Alban Mount, for that is the range of the description, though, perhaps, the description is taken from a poetical view of one of Turner's incomprehensibles, which may account for the conclusion, "Tell me who is likest this, Poussin or Turner?" Now, though Poussin never intended to be like this, let us see the graduate's description of it. We know the little town; it received us as well as our author, having left Rome to visit it.

"Egressum magnâ me accepit Aricia Roma."

Our author, however, doubts if it be the place, though he unhesitatingly abuses Poussin, as if he had fully intended to have painted nothing else than what was seen by the travelling graduate. "At any rate, it is a town on a hill, wooded with two-and-thirty bushes, of very uniform size, and possessing about the same number of leaves each. These bushes are all painted in with one dull opaque brown, becoming very slightly greenish towards the lights, and discover in one place a bit of rock, which of course would in nature have been cool and grey beside the lustrous hues of foliage, and which, therefore, being moreover completely in shade, is consistently and scientifically painted of a very clear, pretty, and positive brick red, the only thing like colour in the picture. The foreground is a piece of road, which, in order to make allowance for its greater nearness, for its being completely in light, and, it may be presumed, for the quantity of vegetation usually present on carriage roads, is given in a very cool green-grey, and the truthful colouring of the picture is completed by a number of dots in the sky on the right, with a stalk to them, of a sober and similar brown." We need not say how unlike is this description of the picture. We pass on to--"Not long ago, I was slowly _descending_ this very bit of carriage road, the first turn after you leave Albano;--it had been wild weather when I left Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun along the Claudian aqueduct, lighting up the infinity of its arches like the bridge of Chaos. But as I _climbed_ the long slope of the Alban mount, the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble outline of the domes of Albano, and graceful darkness of its ilex grove rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber, the upper sky gradually flushing through the last fragments of rain-cloud in deep, palpitating azure, half æther half dew. The noonday sun came slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and its masses of entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain. I cannot call it colour, it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and _silver_ flakes of _orange_ spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the grey walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every glade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheet lightning opens in a cloud at sunset; the motionless masses of dark rock--dark though flushed with scarlet lichen--casting their quiet shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound, and over all--the multitudinous bars of amber and rose, the _sacred_ clouds that have no _darkness_, and only exist to illumine, were seen in fathomless intervals between the solemn and _orbed_ repose of the stone pines, passing to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding lustre of the measureless line where the Campagna melted into the blaze of the sea." In verity, this is no "Campana Supellex." It is a riddle! Is he going up or down hill--or both at once? No human being can tell. He did not like the "sulphur and treacle" of "our Scotch connoisseurs;" but what colours has he not added here to his sulphur--colours, too, that we fear for the "idea of truth" cannot coexist! And how, in the name of optics, could it be possible for any painter to take in all this, with the "_fathomless intervals_," into an angle of vision of forty-five degrees? It is quite superfluous to ask "who is likest this, Turner or Poussin?" There immediately follows a remark upon another picture in the National Gallery, the "Mercury and Woodman," by Salvator Rosa, than which nothing can be more untrue to the original. He asserts that Salvator painted the distant mountains, "throughout, without one instant of variation. But what is its colour? _Pure_ sky-blue, without one grain of grey, or any modifying hue whatsoever;--the same brush which had just given the bluest parts of the sky, has been more loaded at the same part of the pallette, and the whole mountain throw in with unmitigated ultramarine." Now the fact is, that the picture has, in this part, been so injured, that it is hard to say what colour is under the dirty brown-asphaltum hue and texture that covers it. It is certainly not blue now, not "pure blue"--unless pictures change like the cameleon. We know the picture well, and have seen another of the same subject, where the mountains have variety, and yet are blue. We believe a great sum was given for this picture--far more than its condition justifies. We must return--we left the graduate discussing ideas of truth. There is a chapter to show that the truth of nature is not to be discerned by the uneducated senses. As we do not perceive all sounds that enter the ear, so do we not perceive all that is cognizable by the eye--we have, that is, a power of nullifying an impression; that this habit is so common, that from the abstraction of their minds to other subjects, there are probably persons who never saw any thing beautiful. Sensibility to the power of beauty is required--and to see rightly, there should be a perfect state of moral feeling. Even when we think we see with our eyes, our perception is often the result of memory, of previous knowledge; and it is in this way he accounts for the mistake painters and others make with respect to Italian skies. What will Mr Uwin and his followers in blue say to this, alas--Italian skies are not blue? "How many people are misled by what has been said and sung of the serenity of Italian skies, to suppose they must be more blue than the skies of the north, and think that they see them so; whereas the sky of Italy is far more dull and grey in colour than the skies of the north, and is distinguished only by its intense repose of light." Benevenuto Cellini speaks of the mist of Italy. "Repose of light" is rather a novelty--he is fond of it. But then Turner paints with pure white--for ourselves we are with the generality of mankind who prefer the "repose" of shade. "Ask a connoisseur, who has scampered over all Europe, the shape of the leaf of an elm, and the chances are ninety to one that he cannot tell you; and yet he will be voluble of criticism on every painted landscape from Dresden to Madrid"--and why not? The chances are ninety to one that the merits of not a single picture shall depend upon this knowledge, and yet the pictures shall be good and the connoisseur right. One man sees what another does not see in portraits. Undoubtedly; but how any one is to find in a portrait the following, we are at a loss to conceive. "The third has caught the trace of all that was most hidden and most mighty, when all hypocrisy and all habit, and all petty and passing emotion--the _ice, and the bank, and the foam of the immortal river--were shivered and broken, and swallowed up in the awakening of its inward strength_," _&c._ How can a man with a pen in his hand let such stuff as this drop from his fingers' ends?

In the chapter "on the relative importance of truths," there is a little needless display of logic--needless, for we find, after all, he does not dispute "the kind of truths proper to be represented by the painter or sculptor," though he combats the maxim that general truths are preferable to particular. His examples are quite out of art, whether one be spoken of as a man or as Sir Isaac Newton. Even logically speaking, Sir Isaac Newton may be the _whole_ of the subject, and as such a whole might require a generality. There may be many particulars that are best sunk. So, in a picture made up of many parts, it should have a generality totally independent of the particularities of the parts, which must be so represented as not to interfere with that general idea, and which may be altogether in the mind of the artist. This little discussion seems to arise from a sort of quibble on the word important. Sir Joshua and others, who abet the generality maxim, mean no more than that it is of importance to a picture that it contain, fully expressed, one general idea, with which no parts are to interfere, but that the parts will interfere if each part be represented with its most particular truth--and that, therefore, drapery should be drapery merely, not silk or satin, where high truths of the subject are to be impressed.