CHAP. VIII.

TURNER CONTROVERSY CONTINUED.

THE

ANCIENT ART.

THE SOLEMNITIES OF TURNER'S HISTORICAL LANDSCAPES. — CLAUDE

AND TURNER IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY.

IN the concluding chapter of the First Volume of "Modern Painters," we find mention of persons who have

"just enough of feeling to enjoy the solemnity of ancient Art."

I will not stop to comment on the "just enough." In another part of the same chapter we have the following expressions:

Among our greater artists, the chief want at the present day is that of solemnity" (sic) "and definite purpose. We should like to see our artists working out, with all exaction of their concentrated powers, such marked pieces of landscape element as might bear upon them the impression of solemn, earnest, and pervading thought." (I beg special attention to the following.) "Our landscapes are all descriptive, not reflective; agreeable and conventional; but not impressive nor didactic."

I call these just, sober, and excellent words. One might almost think them written beneath the shadow of Salvator's "Soothsayers." But they express one material ground on which I have taken

DIDACTIC LANDSCAPE.

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up this part of our inquiry. I think also, we may take them as about a third answer to the complaint as to "man's shadow on God's work.”

But why should we be put to the work of collocation on such a subject? "The earth hath He given to the children of men." Is it strange if the master's shadow be on the walls of his dwelling? Must we be always ignoring the "cœlumque tueri " to soliloquise "the daisy casting its shadow upon the stone" a thing, it seems, we may not do without peril of Mr. Ruskin. Is it pride to know our place in creation? Is it Religion to forget that man is not only invested with the lordship of the world of Landscape, but is himself, beyond comparison, the noblest of God's works in it? that there is more in his sense of the sun than in the sun itself? that, as Pascal says, "Man is not only a reed, but the weakest in nature; but then he is a reed that thinks; and were all nature to unite and crush him, he were more majestic in his very fall than the universe that overwhelmed him." When I read page after page, about this, that, and the other microscopic "manifestation of spiritual power and vital beauty," I feel as if I were to be compelled to a sort of abnegation of humanity.

“Thou puttest my tears," says the Psalmist, "into thy bottle; are they not all written in thy book?" If man's tears are in his Maker's book, who shall wonder if his foot-prints are on ocean sands, his heart's loneliness on desert rocks, or his whispered sighs in rustling leaves?

* Psalm lvi. 8.

Is it vice, then, or a noble virtue, if those rocks of Salvator speak, not of "hill anatomy," but of stillness, solitariness, sadness, savageness, or intense thoughtfulness? of the wilderness of John the Baptist? of the Desert of Christ's temptation? of Jacob's dreamy pilla of the Witch's cave at Endor? of the strand where Jonah was disenthralled of his Leviathan jailer?

I might ask similar questions as to Claude, though his sympathies are of another cast. He was, perhaps, as poor a hand at foreground figures as Turner, and used to say with characteristic modesty, "I sell you the Landscape, and give you the figures." Yet open his "Liber Veritatis," and you shall find these figures the proper mottos of the scenes they illustrate scenes at once noble and natural; with heroic persons for heroic places Jacob and Laban; or the finding of Moses; or Tobit and the Angel; or the Flight into Egypt; or the Journey to Emmaus. Why will Mr. Ruskin call all this "foolish pastoralism," and "nonsense pictures?"

To turn now, however, to the "Prophet." Turner has imitated ancient art, and competed with it, step by step. I make bold to say that what he has done in that way does not properly characterise, nor belong to him.

On this point I shall throw the onus probandi, as I have done already, on Mr. Ruskin. Here are some unimpeachable extracts from a very elaborate account of Turner; substituted, in the Second Edition of "Modern Painters," for a rhapsody some took for idolatrous.

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"Yorkshire scenery traced most definitely throughout Turner's works. Of all countries " (foreign), "he has most entirely entered into the spirit of France; partly because an amount of thought which will miss of Italy or Switzerland, will fathom France. Hannibal passing the Alps, in its present state, exhibits nothing but a heavy shower, and a number of people getting wet. He seems never to have entered into the spirit of Italy; and the materials he obtained there were afterwards but awkwardly introduced in his large compositions. Of these, there are very few at all worthy of him. Jason" (the Salvator of the series) "has not a bit of Greek in him-nay, I think there is a something of the nineteenth century about his legs. ... Awkward resemblances to Claude testify the want of his usual forceful originality. . . . . . In the Plagues of Egypt he makes us think of Belzoni rather than of Moses. The fifth is a total failure; the pyramids look like brick kilns. Of the larger compositions which have most of Italy in them, the greater part are overwhelmed in quantity, and deficient in emotion. The two Carthages are mere rationalizations of Claude; one of them excessively bad in colour, and the other a grand thought, and yet one of the kind which does no one any good, because everything is mutually sacrificed: the foliage is sacrificed to the architecture, the architecture to the water; the water is neither sea, nor river, nor lake, nor brook, nor canal; and savours of Regent's Park: the foreground is uncomfortable ground, let on building leases." (Modern Painters, pt. ii. sec. i. chap. vii.)

I think I need quote no more to prove that Turner was not, on Mr. Ruskin's showing, much at home in the heroic. Where he was at home, we

shall see in another chapter. It is but justice, however, to add another extract :

"The Caligula's Bridge, Temple of Jupiter, Departure of Regulus, Ancient Italy, Cicero's Villa, and such others, come from what hand they may, I class under the general head of nonsense pictures." (Ibid. § 42.)

I accept this last as a master stroke in the portraiture of Pre-Raffaellitism. I am for "the solemnities of ancient art.

I must say something about our National Gallery Pictures; though the subject is a very delicate one. If a melancholy Blue Book is to be trusted, Turner hangs between a school copy, and an original whose present state opens insoluble questions. He should hang between the Doria and the "Ursula" Claudes. But we must take the battle as he has given it. I, for one, am too much an Englishman not to feel proud, after all, of the name of Turner. But why is he to be always " Turner Agonistes ?”

For the sake therefore of the Turner, not the cleaning controversy, I will venture a suggestion. "If you would view fair" Claude Lorraine "aright," go first to the Ursula picture. Forget, if possible, all controversy of every kind, and just take possession of the picture till the picture takes possession of you. Don't stand too near at first, so as to lose both self and picture in little details; nor yet too far, so as to lose the glow that irradiates and etherialises them; but take a wise man's instinctive distance, and open your heart. After that, but not