Modern Painters Volume IV Part 15

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 64.]

-- 25. Fig. 63 is a facsimile of a piece of the background in Albert Durer's woodcut of the binding of the great Dragon in the Apocalypse. It is one of his most careless and rudest pieces of drawing; yet, observe in it how notably the impulse of the breaking wave is indicated; and note farther, how different a thing good drawing may be from delicate _drawing_ on the one hand, and how different it must be from ignorant drawing on the other. Woodcutting, in Durer's days, had reached no delicacy capable of expressing subtle detail or aerial perspective. But all the subtlety and aerial perspective of modern days are useless, and even barbarous, if they fail in the expression of the essential mountain facts.

-- 26. It will be noticed, however, that in this example of Durer's, the recognition of straightness of line does not exist, and that for this reason the hills look soft and earthy, not rocky.

So, also, in the next example, Fig. 64, the crest in the middle distance is exceedingly fine in its expression of mountain force; the two ridges of it being thrown up like the two edges of a return wave that has just been beaten back from a rock. It is still, however, somewhat wanting in the expression of straightness, and therefore slightly unnatural. It was not people's way in the Middle Ages to look at mountains carefully enough to discover the most subtle elements of their structure. Yet in the next example, Fig. 65, the parallelism and rigidity are definitely indicated, the crest outline being, however, less definite.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 65.]

Note, also (in pa.s.sing), the entire equality of the lines in all these examples, whether turned to dark or light. All good outline drawing, as noticed in the chapter on finish, agrees in this character.

-- 27. The next figure (66) is interesting because it furnishes one of the few instances in which t.i.tian definitely took a suggestion from the Alps, as he saw them from his house at Venice. It is from an old print of a shepherd with a flock of sheep by the sea-side, in which he has introduced a sea distance, with the Venetian church of St. Helena, some subordinate buildings resembling those of Murano, and this piece of cloud and mountain. The peak represented is one of the greater Tyrolese Alps, which shows itself from Venice behind an opening in the chain, and is their culminating point. In reality the ma.s.s is of the shape given in Fig. 67. t.i.tian has modified it into an energetic crest, showing his feeling for the form, but I have no doubt that the woodcut reverses t.i.tian's original work (whatever it was), and that he gave the crest the true inclination to the right, or east, which it has in nature.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 66.]

-- 28. Now, it not unfrequently happens that in Claude's distances he introduces actual outlines of Capri, Ischia, Monte St. Angelo, the Alban Mount, and other chains about Rome and Naples, more or less faithfully copied from nature. When he does so, confining himself to mere outline, the grey contours seen against the distance are often satisfactory enough; but as soon as he brings one of them nearer, so as to require any drawing within its ma.s.s, it is quite curious to see the state of paralysis into which he is thrown for want of any perception of the mountain anatomy. Fig. 68 is one of the largest hills I can find in the Liber Veritatis (No. 86), and it will be seen that there are only a few lines inserted towards the edges, drawn in the direction of the sides of the heap, or cone, wholly without consciousness of any interior structure.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 67.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 68.]

-- 29. I put below it, outlined also in the rudest way (for as I take the shade away from the Liber Veritatis, I am bound also to take it away from Turner), Fig. 69, a bit of the crags in the drawing of Loch Coriskin, partly described already in -- 5 of the chapter on the Inferior Mountains in Vol. I. The crest form is, indeed, here accidentally prominent, and developed to a degree rare even with Turner; but note, besides this, the way in which Turner leans on the _centre_ and body of the hill, not on its edge; marking its strata stone by stone, just as a good figure painter, drawing a limb, marks the fall and rise of the joint, letting the outline sink back softened; and compare the exactly opposite method of Claude, holding for life to his outline, as a Greek navigator holds to the sh.o.r.e.[76]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 69.]

-- 30. Lest, however, it should be thought that I have unfairly chosen my examples, let me take an instance at once less singular and more elaborate.

We saw in our account of Turnerian topography, Chap. II., -- 14, that it had been necessary for the painter, in his modification of the view in the ravine of Fado, to introduce a pa.s.sage from among the higher peaks; which, being thus intended expressly to convey the general impression of their character, must sufficiently ill.u.s.trate what Turner felt that character to be. Observe: it could not be taken from the great central aiguilles, for none such exist at all near Fado; it could only be an expression of what Turner considered the n.o.blest attributes of the hills next to these in elevation,--that is to say, those which we are now examining.

I have etched the portion of the picture which includes this pa.s.sage, on page 221, on its own scale, including the whole couloir above the gallery, and the gallery itself, with the rocks beside it.[77] And now, if the reader will look back to Plate +20+, which is the outline of the _real_ scene, he will have a perfect example, in comparing the two, of the operation of invention of the highest order on a given subject. I should recommend him to put a piece of tracing paper over the etching, Plate +37+, and with his pen to follow some of the lines of it as carefully as he can, until he feels their complexity, and the redundance of the imaginative power which amplified the simple theme, furnished by the natural scene, with such detail; and then let him observe what great mountain laws Turner has been striving to express in all these additions.

-- 31. The cleavages which govern the whole are precisely the same as those of the Aiguille Bouchard, only wrought into grander combinations.

That the reader may the better distinguish them, I give the leading lines coa.r.s.ely for reference in Fig. 70, opposite. The cleavages and lines of force are the following.

[Ill.u.s.tration: J. M. W. Turner. J. Ruskin.

37. Crests of the Slaty Crystallines.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 70.]

1. A B and a.s.sociated lines _a b_, _a b_, &c., over the whole plate.

True beds or cleavage beds (_g h_ in Aiguille Bouchard, Plate +34+); here, observe, closing in retiring perspective with exquisite subtlety, and giving the great unity of radiation to the whole ma.s.s.

2. D E and a.s.sociated lines _d e_, _d e_, over all the plate. Cross cleavage, the second in Aiguille Bouchard; straight and sharp.

Forming here the series of crests at B and D.

3. _r s_, _r s_. Counter-crests, closely corresponding to counter-fracture, the third in Aiguille Bouchard.

4. _m n_, _m n_, &c., over the whole. Writhing aqueous lines falling gradually into the cleavages. Fifth group in Aiguille Bouchard.

The starchy cleavage is not seen here, it being not generally characteristic of the crests, and present in the Bouchard only accidentally.

5. _x x x_. Sinuous lines worn by the water, indicative of some softness or flaws in the rock; these probably the occasion or consequence of the formation of the great precipice or brow on the right. We shall have more to say of them in Chap. XVII.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 71.]

6. _g f_, _g f_, &c. Broad aqueous or glacial curvatures. The sixth group in Aiguille Bouchard.

7. _k l_, _k l_. Concave curves wrought by the descending avalanche; peculiar, of course, to this spot.

8. _i h_, _i h_. Secondary convex curves, glacial or aqueous, corresponding to _g f_, but wrought into the minor secondary ravine. This secondary ravine is a.s.sociated with the opponent aiguillesque ma.s.ses _r s_; and the cause of the break or gap between these and the crests B D is indicated by the elbow or joint of nearer rock, M, where the distortion of the beds or change in their nature first takes place. Turner's idea of the structure of the whole ma.s.s has evidently been that in section it was as in Fig. 71, snapped asunder by elevation, with a nucleus at M, which, allowing for perspective, is precisely on the line of the chasm running in the direction of the arrow; but he gives more of the curved aiguillesque fracture to these upper crests, which are greater in elevation (and we saw, sometime ago, that the higher the rock the harder). And that nucleus of change at M, the hinge, as it were, on which all these promontories of upper crest revolve, is the first or nearest of the evaded stones, which have determined the course of streams and nod of cliffs throughout the chain.

-- 32. I can well believe that the reader will doubt the possibility of all this being intended by Turner: and _intended_, in the ordinary sense, it was not. It was simply seen and instinctively painted, according to the command of the imaginative dream, as the true Griffin was, and as all n.o.ble things are. But if the reader fancies that the apparent truth came by mere chance, or that I am imagining purpose and arrangement where they do not exist, let him be once for all a.s.sured that no man goes through the kind of work which, by this time, he must be beginning to perceive I _have_ gone through, either for the sake of deceiving others, or with any great likelihood of deceiving himself. He who desires to deceive the picture-purchasing public may do so cheaply; and it is easy to bring almost any kind of art into notice without climbing Alps or measuring cleavages. But any one, on the other hand, who desires to ascertain facts, and will refer all art directly to nature for many laborious years, will not at last find himself an easy prey to groundless enthusiasms, or erroneous fancies. Foolish people are fond of repeating a story which has gone the full round of the artistical world,--that Turner, some day, somewhere, said to somebody (time, place, or person never being ascertainable), that I discovered in his pictures things which he did himself not know were there. Turner was not a person apt to say things of this kind; being generally, respecting all the movements of his own mind, as silent as a granite crest; and if he ever did say it, was probably laughing at the person to whom he was speaking. But he _might_ have said it in the most perfect sincerity; nay, I am quite sure that, to a certain extent, the case really was as he is reported to have declared, and that he neither was aware of the value of the truths he had seized nor understood the nature of the instinct that combined them. And yet the truth was a.s.suredly apprehended, and the instinct a.s.suredly present and imperative; and any artists who try to imitate the smallest portion of his work will find that no happy chances will, for them, gather together the resemblances of fact, nor, for them, mimic the majesty of invention.[78]

-- 33. No happy chance--nay, no happy thought--no perfect knowledge--will ever take the place of that mighty unconsciousness. I have often had to repeat that Turner, in the ordinary sense of the words, neither knew nor thought so much as other men. Whenever his _perception_ failed--that is to say, with respect to scientific truths which produce no results palpable to the eye--he fell into the frankest errors. For instance, in such a thing as the relation of position between a rainbow and the sun, there is not any definitely visible connection between them; it needs attention and calculation to discover that the centre of the rainbow is the shadow of the spectator's head.[79] And attention or calculation of this abstract kind Turner appears to have been utterly incapable of; but if he drew a piece of drapery, in which every line of the folds has a _visible_ relation to the points of suspension, not a merely calculable one, this relation he will see to the last thread; and thus he traces the order of the mountain crests to their last stone, not because he knows anything of geology, but because he instinctively seizes the last and finest traces of any visible law.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 72.]

-- 34. He was, however, especially obedient to these laws of the crests, because he heartily loved them. We saw in the early part of this chapter how the crest outlines harmonized with nearly every other beautiful form of natural objects, especially in the continuity of their external curves. This continuity was so grateful to Turner's heart that he would often go great lengths to serve it. For instance, in one of his drawings of the town of Lucerne he has first outlined the Mont Pilate in pencil, with a central peak, as indicated by the dotted line in Fig. 72. This is nearly true to the local fact; but being inconsistent with the general look of crests, and contrary to Turner's instincts, he strikes off the refractory summit, and, leaving his pencil outline still in the sky, touches with color only the contour shown by the continuous line in the figure, thus treating it just as we saw t.i.tian did the great Alp of the Tyrol. He probably, however, would not have done this with so important a feature of the scene as the Mont Pilate, had not the continuous line been absolutely necessary to his composition, in order to oppose the peaked towers of the town, which were his princ.i.p.al subject; the form of the Pilate being seen only as a rosy shadow in the far off sky. We cannot, however, yet estimate the importance, in his mind, of this continuity of descending curve, until we come to the examination of the lower hill _flanks_, hitherto having been concerned only with their rocky summits; and before we leave those summits, or rather the harder rocks which compose them, there is yet another condition of those rocks to be examined; and that the condition which is commonly the most interesting, namely, the Precipice. To this inquiry, however, we had better devote a separate chapter.

FOOTNOTES

[66] So called from the mouldering nature of its rocks. They are slaty crystallines, but unusually fragile.

[67] The materials removed from the slope are spread over the plain or valley below. A nearly equal quant.i.ty is supposed to be removed from the other side; but besides this _removed_ ma.s.s, the materials crumble heavily from above, and form the concave curve.

[68] The lines are a little too straight in their continuations, the engraver having cut some of the curvature out of their thickness, thinking I had drawn them too coa.r.s.ely. But I have chosen this coa.r.s.ely lined example, and others like it, following, because I wish to accustom the reader to distinguish between the mere fineness of instrument in the artist's hand, and the precision of the line he draws. Give t.i.tian a blunt pen, and still t.i.tian's line will be a n.o.ble one: a tyro, with a pen well mended, may draw more neatly; but his lines ought to be discerned from t.i.tian's, if we understand drawing. Every line in this woodcut of Durer's is _refined_; and that in the n.o.blest sense. Whether broad or fine does not matter, the lines are _right_; and the most delicate false line is evermore to be despised, in presence of the coa.r.s.est faithful one.

[69] Not absolutely on the meeting of the curves in one point, but on their radiating with some harmonious succession of difference in direction. The difference between lines which are in true harmony of radiation, and lines which are not, can, in complicated ma.s.ses, only be detected by a trained eye; yet it is often the chief difference between good and bad drawing. A cl.u.s.ter of six or seven black plumes forming the wing of one of the cherubs in t.i.tian's a.s.sumption, at Venice, has a freedom and force about it in the painting which no copyist or engraver has ever yet rendered, though it depends merely on the subtlety of the curves, not on the color.

[70] "_Out of_ perspective," I should have said: but it will show what I mean.

[71] Nor did any nearer observations ever induce me to form any contrary opinion. It is not easy to get any consistent series of _measurements_ of the slope of these gneiss beds; for, although parallel on the great scale, they admit many varieties of dip in minor projections. But all my notes unite, whether at the bottom or top of the great slope of the Montanvert and La Cote, in giving an angle of from 60 to 80 with the horizon; the consistent angle being about 75. I cannot be mistaken in the measurements themselves, however inconclusive observations on minor portions of rock may be; for I never mark an angle unless enough of the upper or lower surface of the beds be smoothly exposed to admit of my pole being adjusted to it by the spirit-level. The pole then indicates the strike of the beds, and a quadrant with a plumb-line their dip; to all intents and purposes accurately. There is a curious distortion of the beds in the ravine between the Glacier des Bois and foot of the Montanvert, near the ice, about a thousand feet above the valley; the beds there seem to bend suddenly back under the glacier, and in some places to be quite vertical. On the opposite side of the glacier, below the Chapeau, the dip of the limestone under the gneiss, with the intermediate bed, seven or eight feet thick, of the grey porous rock which the French call _cargneule_, is highly interesting; but it is so concealed by debris and the soil of the pine forests, as to be difficult to examine to any extent. On the whole, the best position for getting the angle of the beds accurately, is the top of the Tapia, a little below the junction there of the granite and gneiss (see notice of this junction in Appendix 2); a point from which the summit of the Aiguille du Goute bears 11 south of west, and that of the Aiguille Bouchard 17 north of east, the Aiguille Dru 5 or 6 north of east, the peak of it appearing behind the Pet.i.t Charmoz. The beds of gneiss emerging from the turf under the spectator's feet may be brought parallel by the eye with the slopes of the Aiguille du Goute on one side, and the Bouchard (and base of Aiguille d'Argentiere) on the other; striking as nearly as possible from summit to summit through that on which the spectator stands, or from about 10 north of east to 10 south of west, and dipping with exquisite uniformity at an angle of 74 degrees with the horizon. But what struck me as still more strange was, that from this point I could distinctly see traces of the same straight structure running through the Pet.i.t Charmoz, and the roots of the aiguilles themselves, as in Fig. 59; nor could I ever, in the course of countless observations, fairly determine any point where this slaty structure altogether had ceased. It seemed only to get less and less traceable towards the centre of the ma.s.s of Mont Blanc; and, from the ridge of the Aiguille Bouchard itself, at the point _a_ in Plate 33, whence, looking south-west, the aiguilles can be seen in the most accurate profile obtainable throughout the valley of Chamouni, I noticed a very singular parallelism even on the south-east side of the Charmoz, _x y_ (Fig. 60), as if the continued influence of this cleavage were carried on from the Little Charmoz, _c_, _d_ (in which, seen on the opposite side, I had traced it as in Fig. 59), through the central ma.s.s of rock _r_. In this profile, M is the Mont Blanc itself; _m_, the Aiguille du Midi; P, Aiguille du Plan; _b_, Aiguille Blaitiere; C, Great Charmoz; _c_, Pet.i.t Charmoz; E, pa.s.sage called de l'Etala.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 59.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 60.]

[72] Many geologists think they _are_ the true beds. They run across the gneissitic folia, and I hold with De Saussure, and consider them a cleavage.

[73] I tried in vain to get along the ridge of the Bouchard to this junction, the edge of the precipice between _a_ and _b_ (Plate 33) being too broken; but the point corresponds so closely to that of the junction of the gneiss and protogine on the Charmoz ridge, that, adding the evidence of the distant contour, I have no doubt as to the general relations of the rocks.

[74] De Saussure often refers to these as "a.s.saiss.e.m.e.nts." They occur, here and there, in the aiguilles themselves.

[75] The aqueous curves and roundings on the nearer crest (La Cote) are peculiarly tender, because the gneiss of which it is composed is softer in grain than that of the Bouchard, and remains so even to the very top of the peak, _a_, in Fig. 61, where I found it mixed with a yellowish and somewhat sandy quartz rock, and generally much less protogenic than is usual at such elevations on other parts of the chain.

[76] It is worth while noting here, in comparing Fig. 66 and Fig.

68, how entirely our judgment of some kinds of art depends upon knowledge, not on feeling. Any person unacquainted with hills would think Claude's right and t.i.tian's ridiculous: but, after inquiring a little farther into the matter, we find t.i.tian's a careless and intense expression of true knowledge, and Claude's a slow and plausible expression of total ignorance.