The Crown of Wild Olive
press take it upon them to tell us, that the forest trees in Mr. Hunt's
_Sylvia_, and the bunches of lilies in Mr. Collins's _Convent Thoughts_,
are out of perspective.[97]
It might not, I think, in such circumstances, have been ungraceful or
unwise in the Academicians themselves to have defended their young
pupils, at least by the contradiction of statements directly false
respecting them,[98] and the direction of the mind and sight of the
public to such real merit as they possess. If Sir Charles Eastlake,
Mulready, Edwin and Charles Landseer, Cope, and Dyce would each of them
simply state their own private opinion respecting their paintings, sign
it and publish it, I believe the act would be of more service to English
art than any thing the Academy has done since it was founded. But as I
cannot hope for this, I can only ask the public to give their pictures
careful examination, and look at them at once with the indulgence and
the respect which I have endeavored to show they deserve.
Yet let me not be misunderstood. I have adduced them only as examples of
the kind of study which I would desire to see substituted for that of
our modern schools, and of singular success in certain characters,
finish of detail, and brilliancy of color. What faculties, higher than
imitative, may be in these men, I do not yet venture to say; but I do
say that if they exist, such faculties will manifest themselves in due
time all the more forcibly because they have received training so
severe.
For it is always to be remembered that no one mind is like another,
either in its powers or perceptions; and while the main principles of
training must be the same for all, the result in each will be as various
as the kinds of truth which each will apprehend; therefore, also, the
modes of effort, even in men whose inner principles and final aims are
exactly the same. Suppose, for instance, two men, equally honest,
equally industrious, equally impressed with a humble desire to render
some part of what they saw in nature faithfully; and, otherwise trained
in convictions such as I have above endeavored to induce. But one of
them is quiet in temperament, has a feeble memory, no invention, and
excessively keen sight. The other is impatient in temperament, has a
memory which nothing escapes, an invention which never rests, and is
comparatively near-sighted.
Set them both free in the same field in a mountain valley. One sees
everything, small and large, with almost the same clearness; mountains
and grasshoppers alike; the leaves on the branches, the veins in the
pebbles, the bubbles in the stream: but he can remember nothing, and
invent nothing. Patiently he sets himself to his mighty task; abandoning
at once all thoughts of seizing transient effects, or giving general
impressions of that which his eyes present to him in microscopical
dissection, he chooses some small portion out of the infinite scene, and
calculates with courage the number of weeks which must elapse before he
can do justice to the intensity of his perceptions, or the fulness of
matter in his subject.
Meantime, the other has been watching the change of the clouds, and the
march of the light along the mountain sides; he beholds the entire scene
in broad, soft masses of true gradation, and the very feebleness of his
sight is in some sort an advantage to him, in making him more sensible
of the aerial mystery of distance, and hiding from him the multitudes of
circumstances which it would have been impossible for him to represent.
But there is not one change in the casting of the jagged shadows along
the hollows of the hills, but it is fixed on his mind for ever; not a
flake of spray has broken from the sea of cloud about their bases, but
he has watched it as it melts away, and could recall it to its lost
place in heaven by the slightest effort of his thoughts. Not only so,
but thousands and thousands of such images, of older scenes, remain
congregated in his mind, each mingling in new associations with those
now visibly passing before him, and these again confused with other
images of his own ceaseless, sleepless imagination, flashing by in
sudden troops. Fancy how his paper will be covered with stray symbols
and blots, and undecipherable shorthand:--as for his sitting down to
"draw from Nature," there was not one of the things which he wished to
represent that stayed for so much as five seconds together: but none of
them escaped, for all that: they are sealed up in that strange
storehouse of his; he may take one of them out, perhaps, this day twenty
years, and paint it in his dark room, far away. Now, observe, you may
tell both of these men, when they are young, that they are to be honest,
that they have an important function, and that they are not to care what
Raphael did. This you may wholesomely impress on them both. But fancy
the exquisite absurdity of expecting either of them to possess any of
the qualities of the other.
I have supposed the feebleness of sight in the last, and of invention in
the first painter, that the contrast between them might be more
striking; but, with very slight modification, both the characters are
real. Grant to the first considerable inventive power, with exquisite
sense of color; and give to the second, in addition to all his other
faculties, the eye of an eagle; and the first is John Everett Millais,
the second Joseph Mallard William Turner.
They are among the few men who have defied all false teaching, and have,
therefore, in great measure, done justice to the gifts with which they
were entrusted. They stand at opposite poles, marking culminating points
of art in both directions; between them, or in various relations to
them, we may class five or six more living artists who, in like manner,
have done justice to their powers. I trust that I may be pardoned for
naming them, in order that the reader may know how the strong innate
genius in each has been invariably accompanied with the same humility,
earnestness, and industry in study.
It is hardly necessary to point out the earnestness or humility in the
works of William Hunt; but it may be so to suggest the high value they
possess as records of English rural life, and _still_ life. Who is there
who for a moment could contend with him in the unaffected, yet humorous
truth with which he has painted our peasant children? Who is there who
does not sympathize with him in the simple love with which he dwells on
the brightness and bloom of our summer fruit and flowers? And yet there
is something to be regretted concerning him: why should he be allowed
continually to paint the same bunches of hot-house grapes, and supply
to the Water Color Society a succession of pineapples with the
regularity of a Covent Garden fruiterer? He has of late discovered that
primrose banks are lovely; but there are other things grow wild besides
primroses: what undreamt-of loveliness might he not bring back to us, if
he would lose himself for a summer in Highland foregrounds; if he would
paint the heather as it grows, and the foxglove and the harebell as they
nestle in the clefts of the rocks, and the mosses and bright lichens of
the rocks themselves. And then, cross to the Jura, and bring back a
piece of Jura pasture in spring; with the gentians in their earliest
blue, and the soldanelle beside the fading snow! And return again, and
paint a gray wall of Alpine crag, with budding roses crowning it like a
wreath of rubies. That is what he was meant to do in this world; not to
paint bouquets in china vases.
I have in various other places expressed my sincere respect for the
works of Samuel Prout: his shortness of sight has necessarily prevented
their possessing delicacy of finish or fulness of minor detail; but I
think that those of no other living artist furnish an example so
striking of innate and special instinct, sent to do a particular work at
the exact and only period when it was possible. At the instant when
peace had been established all over Europe, but when neither national
character nor national architecture had as yet been seriously changed by
promiscuous intercourse or modern "improvement;" when, however, nearly
every ancient and beautiful building had been long left in a state of
comparative neglect, so that its aspect of partial ruinousness, and of
separation from recent active life, gave to every edifice a peculiar
interest--half sorrowful, half sublime;--at that moment Prout was
trained among the rough rocks and simple cottages of Cornwall, until his
eye was accustomed to follow with delight the rents and breaks, and
irregularities which, to another man, would have been offensive; and
then, gifted with infinite readiness in composition, but also with
infinite affection for the kind of subjects he had to portray, he was
sent to preserve, in an almost innumerable series of drawings, _every
one made on the spot_, the aspect borne, at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, by cities which, in a few years more, rekindled
wars, or unexpected prosperities, were to ravage, or renovate, into
nothingness.
It seems strange to pass from Prout to John Lewis; but there is this
fellowship between them, that both seem to have been intended to
appreciate the characters of foreign countries more than of their
own--nay, to have been born in England chiefly that the excitement of
strangeness might enhance to them the interest of the scenes they had to
represent. I believe John Lewis to have done more entire justice to all
his powers (and they are magnificent ones) than any other man amongst
us. His mission was evidently to portray the comparatively animal life
of the southern and eastern families of mankind. For this he was
prepared in a somewhat singular way--by being led to study, and endowed
with altogether peculiar apprehension of, the most sublime characters of
animals themselves. Rubens, Rembrandt, Snyders, Tintoret, and Titian,
have all, in various ways, drawn wild beasts magnificently; but they
have in some sort humanized or demonized them, making them either
ravenous fiends or educated beasts, that would draw cars, and had
respect for hermits. The sullen isolation of the brutal nature; the
dignity and quietness of the mighty limbs; the shaggy mountainous power,
mingled with grace, as of a flowing stream; the stealthy restraint of
strength and wrath in every soundless motion of the gigantic frame; all
this seems never to have been seen, much less drawn, until Lewis drew
and himself engraved a series of animal subjects, now many years ago.
Since then, he has devoted himself to the portraiture of those European
and Asiatic races, among whom the refinements of civilization exist
without its laws or its energies, and in whom the fierceness, indolence,
and subtlety of animal nature are associated with brilliant imagination
and strong affections. To this task he has brought not only intense
perception of the kind of character, but powers of artistical
composition like those of the great Venetians, displaying, at the same
time, a refinement of drawing almost miraculous, and appreciable only,
as the minutiae of nature itself are appreciable, by the help of the
microscope. The value, therefore, of his works, as records of the aspect
of the scenery and inhabitants of the south of Spain and of the East, in
the earlier part of the nineteenth century, is quite above all estimate.
I hardly know how to speak of Mulready: in delicacy and completion of
drawing, and splendor of color, he takes place beside John Lewis and the
pre-Raphaelites; but he has, throughout his career, displayed no
definiteness in choice of subject. He must be named among the painters
who have studied with industry, and have made themselves great by doing
so; but having obtained a consummate method of execution, he has thrown