Blackwood's Magazine, October 1843
(Go to Summary of review of Modern Painters
I, Blackwood's Magazine, October 1843, pp. 485-500.)
We read this title with some pain, not doubting but that
our modern landscape painters were severely handled in an ironical satire:
and we determined to defend them. 'Their superiority to all the ancient
masters' - that was too hard a hit to come from any but an enemy! We must
measure our man - a graduate of Oxford! The 'scholar armed', without doubt.
He comes, too, vaunting up to us, with his contempt for us and all critics
that ever were, or will be; we are all little Davids in the eye of this
Goliath. Nevertheless, we will put a pebble in our sling. We saw this contempt
of us, in dipping at hap-hazard into the volume. But what was our astonishment
to find, upon looking further, that we had altogether mistaken the intent
of the author... We found that there were not 'giants' in those days, but
in these days - that the author, in his most superlative praise, is not
ironical at all, but a most serious panegyrist, who never laughs, but does
sometimes make his readers laugh... It has much conceit, and but little
merriment; there is nothing really funny after you have got over... that
he 'looks with contempt on Claude, Salvator, and Gaspar Poussin'. (p. 485)
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With all his arrangements and distinctions laid down, as
the very grammar of art, he confuses himself with his 'truths,' forgetting
that in matters of art, truths of fact must be referable to truths of mind.
It is not what things in all respects really are, but what they appear,
and how they are convertible by the mind into what they are not in many
ways, respects, and degrees, that we have to consider, before we can venture
to draw rules from any truths whatever. (p.485)
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The author concludes his introduction with a very bad reason
for his partiality to modern masters, and it is put in most ambitious language,
very readily learned in the "Fudge School", - a style of language with which
our author is very apt to indulge himself. (p. 486)
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We must... in justice say, that by far the best part of
the book, the laying down rules and the elucidating principles, is clearly
and expressively written... Not that we are aware of the advancement of
any thing new; but the admitted maxims of art are, as it were grammatically
analysed, and in a manner to assist the beginner in thinking upon art. To
those who have already thought, this very studied analysis and arrangement
will be tedious enough. (p. 487)
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Nor are we satisfied with his definition of taste - "Perfect
taste is the faculty of receiving the greatest possible pleasure from those
material sources which are attractive to our moral nature in its purity
and perfection." This will not do... That taste, like life itself, is instinctive
in its origin and first motion, we doubt not; but what it is by and in its
cultivation, and in its application to art, is a thing not to be altogether
so cursorily discussed and dismissed. The distinction is laid down between
taste and judgment - judgment being the action of the intellect; taste 'the
instinctive and instant preferring of one material object to another without
any obvious reason'... But leaving this discussion of this original taste,
taste in art is surely as it is a thing cultivated, that for which a reason
can be given, and in some measure therefore, the result of judgment. For
by the cultivation of taste we are actually led to love, admire, and desire
many things of which we have not instinctive love at all; so that the taste
for them arises from the intellect and the moral sense - our judgment. (p.
489)
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Facts are the foundation necessary to the superstructure;
the foundation of which must be there, though unseen, unnoticed in contemplation
of the noble edifice [...] "Nothing," says our author, "can atone for the
want of truth, not the most brilliant imagination, the most playful fancy,
the most pure feeling... 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. (p. 491)
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Here our author jumps at once into his monomania - his adoration
of the works of Turner, which he examines largely and microscopically...
and imagines all the while he is describing and examining nature; and not
unfrequently he tells you, that nature and Turner are the same... This is
'coming it pretty strong'... not that we wish to depreciate Turner. We believe
that he has been better acquainted with many of the truths of nature...
than any other artists, 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. (p. 491)
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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 particular
truth - and that, therefore, drapery should be drapery merely, not silk
or satin, where high truths of the subject are to be impressed. (p. 495)
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We fear the truths, particulars of which occupy the remainder
of the volume - of earth, water, skies, etc., - are very minute truths,
which whether true or false, are of very little importance to art, unless
it be to those branches of art which may treat the whole of each particular
truth as the whole of a subject, a line of works, like certain scenes of
dramatic effect, surprising to see once, but are soon powerless... they
will be the fascinations of the view schools, nay, may even delight the
geologist and the herbalist, but utterly disgust the imaginative. This kind
of 'knowledge' is not 'power' in art. We want not to see water anatomized.
(pp. 496-97)
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We do not think that landscape painters will either gain
or lose much by the publication of this volume, unless it be some mortification
to be so sillily lauded as some of our very respectable painters are. We
do not think that the pictorial world, either in taste or practice, will
be Turnerized by this palpably fulsome, nonsensical praise. In this our
graduate is semper idem, and to keep up his idolatry to the sticking-point,
terminates the volume with a prayer, and begs all the people of England
to join in it - a prayer to Mr. Turner! (p.503)
CW
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