Modern Painters Volume I Part 29

evening star. | | F. Sun three quarters of an hour set. Moon | Folkestone.

struggling through storm clouds, over | heavy sea. |

NIGHT.

EFFECTS. NAMES OF PICTURES.

F. An hour after sunset. No moon. Torchlight. | St. Julien. Tours.

| F. Same hour. Moon rising. Fire from furnaces. | Dudley.

| L.F. Same hour, with storm clouds. Moon | Nantes.

rising. | | L. Same hour, with light of rockets and fire. | Juliet and her Nurse.

| F. Midnight. Moonless, with light-houses. | Calais.

Same hour, with fire-light. | Burning of | Parliament Houses.

| F. Ditto. Full moon. Clear air, with delicate | Towers of the Heve.

clouds. Light-houses. | | F. Ditto, with conflagration, battle smoke, and | Waterloo.

storm. | | F. Ditto. Moonlight through mist. Buildings | Vignette. St.

illuminated in interior. | Herbert's Isle.

| F. Ditto. Full moon with halo. Light | St. Denis.

rain-clouds. | | F. Full moon. Perfectly serene. Sky covered | Alnwick. Vignette of with white cirri. | Rialto, and Bridge.

| of Sighs

SECTION IV.

OF TRUTH OF EARTH.

CHAPTER I.

OF GENERAL STRUCTURE.

-- 1. First laws of the organization of the earth, and their importance in art.

By truth of earth, we mean the faithful representation of the facts and forms of the bare ground, considered as entirely divested of vegetation, through whatever disguise, or under whatever modification the clothing of the landscape may occasion. Ground is to the landscape painter what the naked human body is to the historical. The growth of vegetation, the action of water, and even of clouds upon it and around it, are so far subject and subordinate to its forms, as the folds of the dress and the fall of the hair are to the modulation of the animal anatomy. Nor is this anatomy always so concealed, but in all sublime compositions, whether of nature or art, it must be seen in its naked purity. The laws of the organization of the earth are distinct and fixed as those of the animal frame, simpler and broader, but equally authoritative and inviolable. Their results may be arrived at without knowledge of the interior mechanism; but for that very reason ignorance of them is the more disgraceful, and violation of them more unpardonable. They are in the landscape the foundation of all other truths--the most necessary, therefore, even if they were not in themselves attractive; but they are as beautiful as they are essential, and every abandonment of them by the artist must end in deformity as it begins in falsehood.

-- 2. The slight attention ordinarily paid to them. Their careful study by modern artists.

That such abandonment is constant and total in the works of the old masters, has escaped detection, only because of persons generally cognizant of art, few have spent time enough in hill countries to perceive the certainty of the laws of hill anatomy; and because few, even of those who possess such opportunities, ever think of the common earth beneath their feet, as anything possessing specific form, or governed by steadfast principles. That such abandonment should have taken place cannot be surprising, after what we have seen of their fidelity to skies. Those artists who, day after day, could so falsely represent what was forever before their eyes, when it was to be one of the most important and attractive parts of their picture, can scarcely be expected to give with truth what they could see only partially and at intervals, and what was only to be in their picture a blue line in the horizon, or a bright spot under the feet of their figures.

That such should be all the s.p.a.ce allotted by the old landscape painters to the most magnificent phenomena of nature; that the only traces of those Apennines, which in Claude's walks along the brow of the Pincian, forever bounded his horizon with their azure wall, should, in his pictures, be a cold white outline in the extreme of his tame distance; and that Salvator's sojourns among their fastnesses should only have taught him to shelter his banditti with such paltry morsels of crag as an Alpine stream would toss down before it like a foam-globe; though it may indeed excite our surprise, will, perhaps, when we have seen how these slight pa.s.sages are executed, be rather a subject of congratulation than of regret. It might, indeed, have shortened our labor in the investigation of mountain truth, had not modern artists been so vast, comprehensive, and mult.i.tudinous in their mountain drawings, as to compel us, in order to form the slightest estimate of their knowledge, to enter into some examination of every variety of hill scenery. We shall first gain some general notion of the broad organization of large ma.s.ses, and then take those ma.s.ses to pieces, until we come down to the crumbling soil of the foreground.

-- 3. General structure of the earth. The hills are its action, the plains its rest.

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, pa.s.sion, 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 undulation. 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 firmament, 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 t.i.tan hands to Heaven, saying, "I live forever!"

-- 4. Mountains come out from underneath the plains, and are their support.

But there is this difference between the action of the earth, and that of a living creature, that while the exerted limb marks its bones and tendons through the flesh, the excited earth casts off the flesh altogether, and its bones come out from beneath. Mountains are the bones of the earth, their highest peaks are invariably those parts of its anatomy which in the plains lie buried under five and twenty thousand feet of solid thickness of superinc.u.mbent soil, and which spring up in the mountain ranges in vast pyramids or wedges, flinging their garment of earth away from them on each side. The ma.s.ses of the lower hills are laid over and against their sides, like the ma.s.ses of lateral masonry against the skeleton arch of an unfinished bridge, except that they slope up to and lean against the central ridge: and, finally, upon the slopes of these lower hills are strewed the level beds of sprinkled gravel, sand, and clay, which form the extent of the champaign. Here then is another grand principle of the truth of earth, that the mountains must come from under all, and be the support of all; and that everything else must be laid in their arms, heap above heap, the plains being the uppermost. Opposed to this truth is every appearance of the hills being laid upon the plains, or built upon them. Nor is this a truth only of the earth on a large scale, for every minor rock (in position) comes out from the soil about it as an island out of the sea, lifting the earth near it like waves beating on its sides.

-- 5. Structure of the plains themselves. Their perfect level, when deposited by quiet water.

Such being the structure of the framework of the earth, it is next to be remembered that all soil whatsoever, wherever it is acc.u.mulated in greater quant.i.ty than is sufficient to nourish the moss of the wallflower, has been so, either by the direct transporting agency of water, or under the guiding influence and power of water. All plains capable of cultivation are deposits from some kind of water--some from swift and tremendous currents, leaving their soil in sweeping banks and furrowed ridges--others, and this is in mountain districts almost invariably the case, by slow deposit from a quiet lake in the mountain hollow, which has been gradually filled by the soil carried into it by streams, which soil is of course finally left spread at the exact level of the surface of the former lake, as level as the quiet water itself.

Hence we constantly meet with plains in hill districts, which fill the hollows of the hills with as perfect and faultless a level as water, and out of which the steep rocks rise at the edge with as little previous disturbance, or indication of their forms beneath, as they do from the margin of a quiet lake. Every delta--and there is one at the head of every lake in every hill-district--supplies an instance of this. The rocks at Altorf plunge beneath the plain, which the lake has left, at as sharp an angle as they do into the lake itself beside the chapel of Tell. The plain of the Arve, at Sallenche, is terminated so sharply by the hills to the south-east, that I have seen a man sleeping with his back supported against the mountain, and his legs stretched on the plain; the slope which supported his back rising 5000 feet above him, and the couch of his legs stretched for five miles before him. In distant effect these champaigns lie like deep, blue, undisturbed water, while the mighty hills around them burst out from beneath, raging and tossing like a tumultuous sea. The valleys of Meyringen, Interlachen, Altorf, Sallenche, St. Jean de Maurienne; the great plain of Lombardy itself, as seen from Milan or Padua, under the Alps, the Euganeans, and the Apennines; and the Campo Felice under Vesuvius, are a few, out of the thousand instances, which must occur at once to the mind of every traveller.

-- 6. Ill.u.s.trated by Turner's Marengo.

Let the reader now open Rogers's Italy, at the seventeenth page, and look at the vignette which heads it of the battle of Marengo. It needs no comment. It cannot but carry with it, after what has been said, the instant conviction that Turner is as much of a geologist as he is of a painter. It is a summary of all we have been saying, and a summary so distinct and clear, that without any such explanation it must have forced upon the mind the impression of such facts--of the plunging of the hills underneath the plain--of the perfect level and repose of this latter laid in their arms, and of the tumultuous action of the emergent summits.

-- 7. General divisions of formation resulting from this arrangement.

Plan of investigation.

We find, according to this its internal structure, which, I believe, with the a.s.sistance of Turner, can scarcely now be misunderstood, that the earth may be considered as divided into three great cla.s.ses of formation, which geology has already named for us. Primary--the rocks, which, though in position lower than all others, rise to form the central peaks, or interior nuclei of all mountain ranges. Secondary--the rocks which are laid in beds above these, and which form the greater proportion of all hill scenery. Tertiary--the light beds of sand, gravel, and clay, which are strewed upon the surface of all, forming plains and habitable territory for man. We shall find it convenient, in examining the truth of art, to adopt, with a little modification, the geological arrangement, considering first, the formation and character of the highest or central peaks; then the general structure of the lower mountains, including in this division those composed of the various slates which a geologist would call primary; and, lastly, the minutiae and most delicate characters of the beds of these hills, when they are so near as to become foreground objects, and the structure of the common soil which usually forms the greater s.p.a.ce of an artist's foreground.

Hence our task will arrange itself into three divisions--the investigation of the central mountains, of the interior mountains, and of the foreground.

CHAPTER II.

OF THE CENTRAL MOUNTAINS.

-- 1. Similar character of the central peaks in all parts of the world.

It does not always follow, because a mountain is the highest of its group, that it is in reality one of the central range. The Jungfrau is only surpa.s.sed in elevation, in the chain of which it is a member, by the Schreckhorn and Finster-Aarhorn; but it is entirely a secondary mountain. But the central peaks are usually the highest, and may be considered as the chief components of all mountain scenery in the snowy regions. Being composed of the same rocks in all countries, their external character is the same everywhere. Its chief essential points are the following.

-- 2. Their arrangements in pyramids or wedges, divided by vertical fissures.

Their summits are almost invariably either pyramids or wedges. Domes may be formed by superinc.u.mbent snow, or appear to be formed by the continuous outline of a sharp ridge seen transversely, with its precipice to the spectator; but wherever a rock appears, the uppermost termination of that rock will be a steep edgy ridge, or a sharp point, very rarely presenting even a gentle slope on any of its sides, but usually inaccessible unless enc.u.mbered with snow.

These pyramids and wedges split vertically, or nearly so, giving smooth faces of rock, either perpendicular or very steeply inclined, which appear to be laid against the central wedge or peak, like planks upright against a wall. The surfaces of these show close parallelism; their fissures are vertical, and cut them smoothly, like the edges of shaped planks. Often groups of these planks, if I may so call them, rise higher than those between them and the central ridge, forming detached ridges inclining towards the central one. The planks are cut transversely, sometimes by graceful curvilinear fissures; sometimes by straight fissures, which are commonly parallel to the slope of one of the sides of the peak, while the main direction of the planks or leaves is parallel to that of its other side, or points directly to its summit.

But the _universal_ law of fracture is--first, that it is clean and sharp, having a perfectly smooth surface, and a perfectly sharp edge to all the fissures; secondly, that every fissure is steeply inclined, and that a horizontal line, or one approaching to it, is an impossibility, except in some turn of a curve.

-- 3. Causing groups of rock resembling an artichoke or rose.

Hence, however the light may fall, these peaks are seen marked with sharp and defined shadows, indicating the square edges of the planks of which they are made up, which shadows sometimes are vertical, pointing to the summit; but are oftener parallel to one of the sides of the peak, and intersected by a second series, parallel to the other side. Where there has been much disintegration, the peak is often surrounded with groups of lower ridges or peaks, like the leaves of an artichoke or a rose, all evidently part and parcel of the great peak; but falling back from it, as if it were a budding flower, expanding its leaves one by one.