Church of England Quarterly, January 1844.

(Go to Summary of review of Modern Painters I, Church of England Quarterly Review, January 1844, pp. 213-21.)

He must indeed be a dull or unobservant reader of the 'signs of the times' who has failed to remark that rapid strides have been made, of late years, both in the appreciation and practice of high art. It is not our desire... in the compass of this notice, to speculate on the causes of this increased progression: we simply advert to the fact, of which, if proof were wanting, we should at once adduce the volume before us. There is an athletic boldness about it, admirably in keeping with the artistical learning it develops in every page - an eloquence which can only belong to a highly... poetical mind... No man can read this book without being struck by the profound knowledge of art - the quick, keen, deep, observation of nature in all her forms and phases - the refined philosophy, and the aptitude of illustration which have conspired to produce it. (p.213)

We know not that we can more appropriately introduce the Graduate to our readers than in the following eloquent exposition of the feelings with which he has entered on his task; and we are the more anxious to give the quotation, because, with a taste which we do not envy, it has been sneered at by a contemporary critic:-

And if, in the application of these principles, in spite of my
endeavour to render it impartial, the feeling and fondness which I
have for some works-of modern art escape me sometimes where it
should not, let it be pardoned as little more than a fair counter
balance to that peculiar veneration with which the work of the older
master, associated as it has ever been in our ears with the expres
sion of whatever is great or perfect, must be usually regarded by
the reader. I do not say that this veneration is wrong, nor that
we should be less attentive to the repeated words of time: but let
us not forget, that if honour be for the dead, gratitude can only
be for the living. He who has once stood beside the grave, to
look back upon the companionship which has been for ever closed,
feeling how impotent there are the wild love, or the keen sorrow, to
give one instant's pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the
lowest measure to the departed spirit for the hour of unkindness,
will scarcely for the future incur that debt to the heart, which can
only be discharged to the dust. But the lesson which men receive
as individuals, they do not learn as nations. Again and again they
have seen their noblest descend into the grave, and have thought it
enough to garland the tombstone when they had not crowned the
brow, and to pay the honour to the ashes, which they had denied
to the spirit. Let it not displease them that they are bidden, amidst
the tumult and the dazzle of their busy life, to listen for the few
voices, and watch for the few lamps, which God has toned and
lighted to charm and to guide them, that they may not learn their
sweetness by their silence, nor their light by their decay[.]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

But let him speak again for himself, in an extract from his chapter on the 'Truth of Tone':-

The comparison of Turner with Cuyp and Claude may sound
strange in most ears; but this is chiefly because we are not in the
habit of analyzing and dwelling upon those difficult and daring
passages of the modern master which do not at first appeal to our
ordinary notions of truth, owing to his habit of uniting two, three,
or even more separate tones in the same composition. In this also
he strictly follows nature, for wherever climate changes, tone changes,
and the climate changes with every 200 feet of elevation, so that
the upper clouds are always different in tone from the lower ones,
these from the rest of the landscape, and in all probability, some
part of the horizon from the rest. And when nature allows this
in a high degree, as in her most gorgeous effects she always will,
she does not herself impress at once with intensity of tone, as in
the deep and quiet yellows of a July evening, but rather with the
magnificence and variety of associated colour, in which, if we give
time and attention to it, we shall gradually find the solemnity and
the depth of twenty tones instead of one. Now in Turner's power
of associating cold with warm light no one has ever approached, or
even ventured into the same field with him. The old masters,
content with one simple tone, sacrificed to its unity all the
exquisite gradations and varied touches of relief and change by
which nature unites her hours with each other. They gave the
warmth of the sinking sun, overwhelming all things in its gold, but
they did not give those grey passages about the horizon where,
seen through its dying light, the cool and the gloom of night
gather themselves for their victory. Whether it was in them impo
tence or judgment, it is not for me to decide. I have only to point
to the daring of Turner in this respect as something to which art
affords no matter of comparison, as that in which the mere attempt
is, in itself, superiority. Take the evening effect with the Temeraire.
That picture will not, at the first glance, deceive as a piece of
actual sunlight, but this is because there is in it more than sunlight,
because under the blazing veil of vaulted fire which lights the vessel
on her last path, there is a blue, deep, desolate hollow of darkness,
out of which you can hear the voice of the night wind, and the
dull boom of the disturbed sea; because the cold, deadly shadows
of the twilight are gathering through every sunbeam, and moment
by moment as you look, you will fancy some new film and faint
ness of the night has risen over the vastness of the departing form[.]

Take another extract from Truth of Colour, equally full of profound thought, keen observation of nature, and startling eloquence:-

THERE is, in the first room of the National Gallery, a landscape
attributed to Gaspar Poussin, called sometimes Aricia, sometimes
Le or La Riccia. according to. the fancy of catalogue printers.
Whether it can be supposed to resemble the ancient Aricia, now
La Riccia, close to Albano, I will not take upon me to determine,
seeing that most of the towns of these old masters are quite as
like one place as another; but, at any rate, it is a town on a hill,
wooded with two-and-thirty bushes, of very uniform size, and pos
sessing 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 truth 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.
Not long ago, I was slowly descending this very bit of carriage
road, the first turn after you leave Albano, not a little impeded by
the worthy successors of the ancient prototypes of Veiento.' 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
aether and half dew. The noon-day 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
sun-beam, 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 multitu
dinous 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 measure
less line where the Campagna melted into the blaze of the sea.
Tell me who is likest this, Poussin or Turner ?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

We quote an example [on the subject of Chiaroscura]:-

The second point to which I wish at present to direct attention
has reference to the arrangement of light and shade. It is the
constant habit of nature to use both her highest lights and deepest
shadows in exceedingly small quantity; always in points, never in
masses. She will give a large mass of tender light in sky or water,
impressive by its quantity, and a large mass of tender shadow
relieved against it, in foliage, or hill, or building; but the light is
always subdued if it be extensive-the shadow always feeble if it be
broad. She will then fill up all the rest of her picture with middle
tints and pale greys of some sort or another, and on this quiet and
harmonious whole, she will touch her high lights in spots-the
foam of an isolated wave-the sail of a solitary vessel-the flash
of the sun from a wet roof-the gleam of a single white-washed
cottage-or some such sources of local brilliancy, she will use so
vividly and delicately as to throw everything else into definite
shade by comparison, And then taking up the gloom, she will
use the black hollows of some overhanging bank, or the black
dress of some shaded figure, or the depth of some sunless chink
of wall or window, so sharply as to throw everything else into
definite light by comparison; thus reducing the whole mass of her
picture to a delicate middle tint, approaching, of course, here to
light, and there to gloom; but yet sharply separated from the
utmost degrees either of the one or the other[.]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

With reference to the following passage, for instance, he might have vindicated Turner's fidelity, in giving the view from Highgate-hill, without attributing to the ancient painters the absurdities into which he alleges their attempts to portray the same scene would have betrayed them:-

                                                       Go to the top of Highgate Hill on
a clear summer morning at five o'clock, and look at Westminster
Abbey. You will receive an impression of a building enriched with
multitudinous vertical lines. Try to distinguish one of those lines
all the way down from the one next to it : You cannot. Try to
count them : You cannot. Try to make out the beginning or end
of any one of them: You cannot. Look at it generally, and it
is all symmetry and arrangement. Look at it in its parts, and it is
all inextricable confusion. Am not I, at this moment, describing a
piece of Turner's drawing, with the same words by which I describe
nature? And what would one of the old masters have done with
such a building as this in his distance? Either he would only
have given the shadows of the buttresses, and the light and dark
sides of the two towers, and two dots for the windows; or if
more ignorant and more ambitious, he had attempted to render
some of the detail, it would have been done by distinct lines,
would have been broad caricature of the delicate building, felt at
once to be false, ridiculous, and offensive. His most successful
effort would only have given us, through his carefully toned
atmosphere, the effect of a colossal parish church, without one
line of carving on its economic sides. Turner, and Turner only,
would follow and render on the canvass that mystery of decided
line,-that distinct, sharp, visible, but unintelligible and inextricable
richness, which, examined part by part, is to the eye nothing but con
fusion and defeat, which, taken as a whole, is all unity, symmetry,
and truth[.]

Singular clearness and aptness of illustration are among the conspicuous attractions and merits of this work; of this we will given an eloquent example:-

Mountains are, to the rest of the body of the earth, what violent
muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons
of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with fierce and
convulsive energy, full of expression, passion, and strength; the
plains and the lower hills are the repose and the effortless motion
of the frame, when its muscles lie dormant and concealed beneath
the lines of its beauty, yet ruling those lines in their every undu
lation. This, then, is the first grand principle of the truth of
the earth. The spirit of the hills is action; that of the lowlands,
repose; and between these there is to be found every variety of
motion and of rest; from the inactive plain, sleeping like the firma
ment, with cities for stars, to the fiery peaks, which, with heaving
bosoms and exulting limbs, with the clouds drifting like hair from
their bright foreheads, lift up their Titan hands to Heaven, saying,
"I live for ever[.]

How exquisitely poetical is the concluding sentence of this paragraph.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

[L]et us express a hope that Alpine scenery will not
continue to be neglected as it has been, by those who alone are
capable of treating it. We love Italy, but we have had rather a
surfeit of it lately ;—too many peaked caps and flat-headed pines.
We should be very grateful to Harding and Stanfield if they would
refresh us a little among the snow, and give us, what we believe
them to be capable of giving us, a faithful expression of Alpine ideal.
We are well aware of the pain inflicted on an artist's mind by the
preponderance of black, and white, and green, over more available
colours ; but there is nevertheless in generic Alpine scenery, a foun-
tain of feeling yet unopened—a chord of harmony yet untouched by
art. It will be struck by the first man who can separate what is
national, in Switzerland, from what is ideal. We do not want chalets
and three-legged stools, cow-bells and buttermilk. We want the
pure and holy hills, treated as a link between heaven and earth[.]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

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 compasses —not to be chipped out by the
geologist, or equated by the mathematician. It is intangible, incal-
culable —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[.]

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In dismissing this volume from our hands we feel bound to state, that, making all allowance for much of which we disapprove... it is one of the most valuable, because one of the most practical and philosophical, treatises on art that has appeared in modern times. (p.221)

CW