Modern Painters Volume III Part 24

[91] Scenes et Proverbes. La Crise; (Scene en caleche, hors Paris.)

[92] Compare the characters of Fleur de Marie and Rigolette, in the Mysteres de Paris. I know no other instance in which the two tempers are so exquisitely delineated and opposed. Read carefully the beautiful pastoral, in the eighth chapter of the first Part, where Fleur de Marie is first taken into the fields under Montmartre, and compare it with the sixth of the second Part, its accurately traced companion sketch, noting carefully Rigolette's "Non, _je deteste la campagne_." She does not, however, dislike flowers or birds: "Cette caisse de bois, que Rigolette appellait le jardin de ses oiseaux, etait remplie de terre recouverte de mousse, pendant l'hiver. Elle travaillait aupres de la fenetre ouverte, a-demi-voilee par un verdoyant rideau de pois de senteur roses, de capucines oranges, de volubilis bleus et blancs."

[93] I have not read Clarissa.

[94] It might be thought that Young _could_ have sympathized with it. He would have made better use of it, but he would not have had the same delight in it. He turns his solitude to good account; but this is because, to him, solitude is sorrow, and his real enjoyment would have been of amiable society, and a place at court.

[95] "The light-outspeeding telegraph Bears nothing on its beam." EMERSON.

See Appendix III., Plagiarism.

[96] Compare what is said before in various places of good and bad finish, good and bad mystery, &c. If a man were disposed to system-making, he could easily throw together a counter-system to Aristotle's, showing that in all things there were two extremes which exactly resembled each other, but of which one was bad, the other good; and a mean, resembling neither, but better than the one, and worse than the other.

CHAPTER XVIII.

OF THE TEACHERS OF TURNER.

-- 1. The first step to the understanding either the mind or position of a great man ought, I think, to be an inquiry into the elements of his early instruction, and the mode in which he was affected by the circ.u.mstances of surrounding life. In making this inquiry, with respect to Turner, we shall be necessarily led to take note of the causes which had brought landscape-painting into the state in which he found it; and, therefore, of those transitions of style which, it will be remembered, we overleaped (hoping for a future opportunity of examining them) at the close of the fifteenth chapter.

-- 2. And first, I said, it will be remembered, some way back, that the relations between Scott and Turner would probably be found to differ very curiously from those between Dante and Giotto. They differ primarily in this,--that Dante and Giotto, living in a consistent age, were subjected to one and the same influence, and maybe reasoned about almost in similar terms. But Scott and Turner, living in an inconsistent age, became subjected to inconsistent influences; and are at once distinguished by notable contrarieties, requiring separate examination in each.

-- 3. Of these, the chief was that Scott, having had the blessing of a totally neglected education, was able early to follow most of his n.o.ble instincts; but Turner, having suffered under the instruction of the Royal Academy, had to pa.s.s nearly thirty years of his life in recovering from its consequences;[97] this permanent result following for both,--that Scott never was led into any fault foreign to his nature, but spoke what was in him, in rugged or idle simplicity; erring only where it was natural to err, and failing only where it was impossible to succeed. But Turner, from the beginning, was led into constrained and unnatural error; diligently debarred from every ordinary help to success. The one thing which the Academy _ought_ to have taught him (namely, the simple and safe use of oil color), it never taught him; but it carefully repressed his perceptions of truth, his capacities of invention, and his tendencies of choice. For him it was impossible to do right but in the spirit of defiance; and the first condition of his progress in learning, was the power to forget.

-- 4. One most important distinction in their feelings throughout life was necessitated by this difference in early training. Scott gathered what little knowledge of architecture he possessed, in wanderings among the rocky walls of Crichtoun, Lochleven, and Linlithgow, and among the delicate pillars of Holyrood, Roslin, and Melrose. Turner acquired his knowledge of architecture at the desk, from academical elevations of the Parthenon and St. Paul's; and spent a large portion of his early years in taking views of gentlemen's seats, temples of the Muses, and other productions of modern taste and imagination; being at the same time directed exclusively to cla.s.sical sources for information as to the proper subjects of art. Hence, while Scott was at once directed to the history of his native land, and to the Gothic fields of imagination; and his mind was fed in a consistent, natural, and felicitous way from his youth up, poor Turner for a long time knew no inspiration but that of Twickenham; no sublimity but that of Virginia Water. All the history and poetry presented to him at the age when the mind receives its dearest a.s.sociations, were those of the G.o.ds and nations of long ago; and his models of sentiment and style were the worst and last wrecks of the Renaissance affectations.

-- 5. Therefore (though utterly free from affectation), his early works are full of an _enforced_ artificialness, and of things ill-done and ill-conceived, because foreign to his own instincts; and, throughout life, whatever he did, because he thought he _ought_ to do it, was wrong; all that he planned on any principle, or in supposed obedience to canons of taste, was false and abortive: he only did right when he ceased to reflect; was powerful only when he made no effort, and successful only when he had taken no aim.

-- 6. And it is one of the most interesting things connected with the study of his art, to watch the way in which his own strength of English instinct breaks gradually through fetter and formalism; how from Egerian wells he steals away to Yorks.h.i.+re streamlets; how from Homeric rocks, with laurels at the top and caves in the bottom, he climbs, at last, to Alpine precipices fringed with pine, and fortified with the slopes of their own ruins; and how from Temples of Jupiter and Gardens of the Hesperides, a spirit in his feet guides him, at last, to the lonely arches of Whitby, and bleak sands of Holy Isle.

-- 7. As, however, is the case with almost all inevitable evil, in its effect on great minds, a certain good rose even out of this warped education; namely, his power of more completely expressing all the tendencies of his epoch, and sympathizing with many feelings and many scenes which must otherwise have been entirely profitless to him. Scott's mind was just as large and full of sympathy as Turner's; but having been permitted always to take his own choice among sources of enjoyment, Scott was entirely incapable of entering into the spirit of any cla.s.sical scene. He was strictly a Goth and a Scot, and his sphere of sensation may be almost exactly limited by the growth of heather. But Turner had been forced to pay early attention to whatever of good and right there was even in things naturally distasteful to him. The charm of early a.s.sociation had been cast around much that to other men would have been tame: while making drawings of flower-gardens and Palladian mansions, he had been taught sympathy with whatever grace or refinement the garden or mansion could display, and to the close of life could enjoy the delicacy of trellis and parterre, as well as the wildness of the wood and the moorland; and watch the staying of the silver fountain at its appointed height in the sky, with an interest as earnest, if not as intense, as that with which he followed the crash of the Alpine cataract into its clouds of wayward rage.

-- 8. The distinct losses to be weighed against this gain are, first, the waste of time during youth in painting subjects of no interest whatsoever,--parks, villas, and ugly architecture in general: secondly, the devotion of its utmost strength in later years to meaningless cla.s.sical compositions, such as the Fall and Rise of Carthage, Bay of Baiae, Daphne and Leucippus, and such others, which, with infinite acc.u.mulation of material, are yet utterly heartless and emotionless, dead to the very root of thought, and incapable of producing wholesome or useful effect on any human mind, except only as exhibitions of technical skill and graceful arrangement: and, lastly, his incapacity, to the close of life, of entering heartily into the spirit of any elevated architecture; for those Palladian and cla.s.sical buildings which he had been taught that it was right to admire, being wholly devoid of interest, and in their own formality and barrenness quite unmanageable, he was obliged to make them manageable in his pictures by disguising them, and to use all kinds of playing shadows and glittering lights to obscure their ugly details; and as in their best state such buildings are white and colorless, he a.s.sociated the idea of whiteness with perfect architecture generally, and was confused and puzzled when he found it grey. Hence he never got thoroughly into the feeling of Gothic; its darkness and complexity embarra.s.sed him; he was very apt to whiten by way of idealizing it, and to cast aside its details in order to get breadth of delicate light. In Venice, and the towns of Italy generally, he fastened on the wrong buildings, and used those which he chose merely as kind of white clouds, to set off his brilliant groups of boats, or burning s.p.a.ces of lagoon. In various other minor ways, which we shall trace in their proper place, his cla.s.sical education hindered or hurt him; but I feel it very difficult to say how far the loss was balanced by the general grasp it gave his mind; nor am I able to conceive what would have been the result, if his aims had been made at once narrower and more natural, and he had been led in his youth to delight in Gothic legends instead of cla.s.sical mythology; and, instead of the porticos of the Parthenon, had studied in the aisles of Notre Dame.

-- 9. It is still more difficult to conjecture whether he gathered most good or evil from the pictorial art which surrounded him in his youth. What that art was, and how the European schools had arrived at it, it now becomes necessary briefly to inquire.

It will be remembered that, in the 14th chapter, we left our mediaeval landscape (-- 18.) in a state of severe formality, and perfect subordination to the interest of figure subject. I will now rapidly trace the mode and progress of its emanc.i.p.ation.

-- 10. The formalized conception of scenery remained little altered until the time of Raphael, being only better executed as the knowledge of art advanced; that is to say, though the trees were still stiff, and often set one on each side of the princ.i.p.al figures, their color and relief on the sky were exquisitely imitated, and all groups of near leaves and flowers drawn with the most tender care, and studious botanical accuracy. The better the subjects were painted, however, the more logically absurd they became: a background wrought in Chinese confusion of towers and rivers, was in early times pa.s.sed over carelessly, and forgiven for the sake of its pleasant color; but it appealed somewhat too far to imaginative indulgence when Ghirlandajo drew an exquisite perspective view of Venice and her lagoons behind an Adoration of the Magi;[98] and the impossibly small boats which might be pardoned in a mere illumination, representing the miraculous draught of fishes, became, whatever may be said to the contrary, inexcusably absurd in Raphael's fully realized landscape; so as at once to destroy the credibility of every circ.u.mstance of the event.

-- 11. A certain charm, however, attached itself to many forms of this landscape, owing to their very unnaturalness, as I have endeavored to explain already in the last chapter of the second volume, ---- 9. to 12.; noting, however, there, that it was in no wise to be made a subject of imitation; a conclusion which I have since seen more and more ground for holding finally. The longer I think over the subject, the more I perceive that the pleasure we take in such unnatural landscapes is intimately connected with our habit of regarding the New Testament as a beautiful poem, instead of a statement of plain facts. He who believes thoroughly that the events are true will expect, and ought to expect, real olive copse behind real Madonna, and no sentimental absurdities in either.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 11. Latest Purism.]

-- 12. Nor am I at all sure how far the delight which we take (when I say _we_, I mean, in general, lovers of old sacred art) in such quaint landscape, arises from its peculiar _falsehood_, and how far from its peculiar _truth_. For as it falls into certain errors more boldly, so, also, what truth it states, it states more firmly than subsequent work. No engravings, that I know, render the backgrounds of sacred pictures with sufficient care to enable the reader to judge of this matter unless before the works themselves. I have, therefore, engraved, on the opposite page, a bit of the background of Raphael's Holy Family, in the Tribune of the Uffizii, at Florence. I copied the trees leaf for leaf, and the rest of the work with the best care I could; the engraver, Mr. Armytage, has admirably rendered the delicate atmosphere which partly veils the distance. Now I do not know how far it is necessary to such pleasure as we receive from this landscape, that the trees should be both so straight and formal in stem, and should have branches no thicker than threads; or that the outlines of the distant hills should approximate so closely to those on any ordinary Wedgewood's china pattern. I know that, on the contrary, a great part of the pleasure arises from the sweet expression of air and suns.h.i.+ne; from the traceable resemblance of the city and tower to Florence and Fesole; from the fact that, though the boughs are too thin, the lines of ramification are true and beautiful; and from the expression of continually varied form in the cl.u.s.ters of leaf.a.ge. And although all lovers of sacred art would shrink in horror from the idea of subst.i.tuting for such a landscape a bit of Cuyp or Rubens, I do not think that the horror they feel is because Cuyp and Rubens's landscape is _truer_, but because it is _coa.r.s.er_ and more vulgar in a.s.sociated idea than Raphael's; and I think it possible that the true forms of hills, and true thicknesses of boughs, might be tenderly stolen into this background of Raphael's without giving offence to any one.

-- 13. Take a somewhat more definite instance. The rock in Fig. 5., at the side, is one put by Ghirlandajo into the background of his Baptism of Christ. I have no doubt Ghirlandajo's own rocks and trees are better, in several respects, than those here represented, since I have copied them from one of Lasinio's execrable engravings; still, the harsh outline, and generally stiff and uninventful blankness of the design are true enough, and characteristic of all rock-painting of the period. In the plate below I have etched[99]

the outline of a fragment of one of Turner's cliffs, out of his drawing of Bolton Abbey; and it does not seem to me that, supposing them properly introduced in the composition, the subst.i.tution of the soft natural lines for the hard unnatural ones would make Ghirlandajo's background one whit less sacred.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 5.]

-- 14. But be this as it may, the fact is, as ill luck would have it, that profanity of feeling, and skill in art, increased together; so that we do not find the backgrounds rightly painted till the figures become irreligious and feelingless; and hence we a.s.sociate necessarily the perfect landscape with want of feeling. The first great innovator was either Masaccio or Filippino Lippi: their works are so confused together in the Chapel of the Carmine, that I know not to whom I may attribute,--or whether, without being immediately quarrelled with, and contradicted, I may attribute to anybody,--the landscape background of the fresco of the Tribute Money. But that background, with one or two other fragments in the same chapel, is far in advance of all other work I have seen of the period, in expression of the rounded contours and large slopes of hills, and the a.s.sociation of their summits with the clouds. The opposite engraving will give some better idea of its character than can be gained from the outlines commonly published; though the dark s.p.a.ces, which in the original are deep blue, come necessarily somewhat too harshly on the eye when translated into light and shade. I shall have occasion to speak with greater speciality of this background in examining the forms of hills; meantime, it is only as an isolated work that it can be named in the history of pictorial progress, for Masaccio died too young to carry out his purposes; and the men around him were too ignorant of landscape to understand or take advantage of the little he had done. Raphael, though he borrowed from him in the human figure, never seems to have been influenced by his landscape, and retains either, as in Plate 11., the upright formalities of Perugino; or, by way of being natural, expands his distances into flattish flakes of hill, nearly formless, as in the backgrounds of the Charge to Peter and Draught of Fishes; and thenceforward the Tuscan and Roman schools grew more and more artificial, and lost themselves finally under round-headed niches and Corinthian porticos.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 12. The Sh.o.r.es of Wharfe.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 13. First Mountain Naturalism.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 14. The Lombard Apennine.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 15. St. George of the Seaweed.]

-- 15. It needed, therefore, the air of the northern mountains and of the sea to brace the hearts of men to the development of the true landscape schools. I sketched by chance one evening the line of the Apennines from the ramparts of Parma, and I have put the rough note of it, and the sky that was over it, in Plate 14., and next to this (Plate 15.) a moment of sunset, behind the Euganean hills at Venice.

I shall have occasion to refer to both hereafter; but they have some interest here as types of the kind of scenes which were daily set before the eyes of Correggio and t.i.tian, and of the sweet free s.p.a.ces of sky through which rose and fell, to them, the colored rays of the morning and evening.

-- 16. And they are connected, also, with the forms of landscape adopted by the Lombardic masters, in a very curious way. We noticed that the Flemings, educated entirely in flat land, seemed to be always contented with the scenery it supplied; and we should naturally have expected that t.i.tian and Correggio, living in the midst of the levels of the lagoons, and of the plain of Lombardy, would also have expressed, in their backgrounds, some pleasure in such level scenery, a.s.sociated, of course, with the sublimity of the far-away Apennine, Euganean, or Alp. But not a whit. The plains of mulberry and maize, of sea and shoal, by which they were surrounded, never occur in their backgrounds but in cases of necessity; and both of them, in all their important landscapes, bury themselves in wild wood; Correggio delighting to relieve with green darkness of oak and ivy the golden hair and snowy flesh of his figures; and t.i.tian, whenever the choice of a scene was in his power, retiring to the narrow glens and forests of Cadore.

-- 17. Of the vegetation introduced by both, I shall have to speak at length in the course of the chapters on Foliage; meantime, I give in Plate 16. one of t.i.tian's slightest bits of background, from one of the frescoes in the little chapel behind St. Antonio, at Padua, which may be compared more conveniently than any of his more elaborate landscapes with the purist work from Raphael. For in both these examples the trees are equally slender and delicate, only the formality of mediaeval art is, by t.i.tian, entirely abandoned, and the old conception of the aspen grove and meadow done away with for ever. We are now far from cities: the painter takes true delight in the desert; the trees grow wild and free; the sky also has lost its peace, and is writhed into folds of motion, closely impendent upon earth, and somewhat threatening, through its solemn light.

-- 18. Although, however, this example is characteristic of t.i.tian in its wildness, it is not so in its _looseness_. It is only in the distant backgrounds of the slightest work, or when he is in a hurry, that t.i.tian is vague: in all his near and studied work he completes every detail with scrupulous care. The next Plate, 17., a background of Tintoret's, from his picture of the Entombment at Parma, is more entirely characteristic of the Venetians. Some mistakes made in the reduction of my drawing during the course of engraving have cramped the curves of the boughs and leaves, of which I will give the true outline farther on; meantime the subject, which is that described in -- 16. of the chapter on Penetrative Imagination, Vol. II., will just as well answer the purpose of exemplifying the Venetian love of gloom and wildness, united with perfect definition of detail. Every leaf and separate blade of gra.s.s is drawn; but observe how the blades of gra.s.s are broken, how completely the aim at expression of faultlessness and felicity has been withdrawn, as contrary to the laws of the existent world.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 16. Early Naturalism.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: 17. Advanced Naturalism.]

-- 19. From this great Venetian school of landscape Turner received much important teaching,--almost the only healthy teaching which he owed to preceding art. The designs of the Liber Studiorum are founded first on nature, but in many cases modified by _forced_ imitation of Claude, and _fond_ imitation of t.i.tian. All the worst and feeblest studies in the book--as the pastoral with the nymph playing the tambourine, that with the long bridge seen through trees, and with the flock of goats on the walled road--owe the princ.i.p.al part of their imbecilities to Claude; another group (Solway Moss, Peat Bog, Lauffenbourg, &c.) is taken with hardly any modification by pictorial influence, straight from nature; and the finest works in the book--the Grande Chartreuse, Rizpah, Jason, Cephalus, and one or two more--are strongly under the influence of t.i.tian.

-- 20. The Venetian school of landscape expired with Tintoret, in the year 1594; and the sixteenth century closed, like a grave, over the great art of the world. There is _no_ entirely sincere or great art in the seventeenth century. Rubens and Rembrandt are its two greatest men, both deeply stained by the errors and affectations of their age. The influence of the Venetians hardly extended to them; the tower of the t.i.tianesque art fell southwards; and on the dust of its ruins grew various art-weeds, such as Domenichino and the Carraccis. Their landscape, which may in few words be accurately defined as "Sc.u.m of t.i.tian," possesses no single merit, nor any ground for the forgiveness of demerit; they are to be named only as a link through which the Venetian influence came dimly down to Claude and Salvator.

-- 21. Salvator possessed real genius, but was crushed by misery in his youth, and by fas.h.i.+onable society in his age. He had vigorous animal life, and considerable invention, but no depth either of thought or perception. He took some hints directly from nature, and expressed some conditions of the grotesque of terror with original power; but his baseness of thought, and bluntness of sight, were unconquerable; and his works possess no value whatsoever for any person versed in the walks of n.o.ble art. They had little, if any, influence on Turner; if any, it was in blinding him for some time to the grace of tree trunks, and making him tear them too much into splinters.

-- 22. Not so Claude, who may be considered as Turner's princ.i.p.al master. Claude's capacities were of the most limited kind; but he had tenderness of perception, and sincerity of purpose, and he effected a revolution in art. This revolution consisted mainly in setting the sun in heaven.[100] Till Claude's time no one had seriously thought of painting the sun but conventionally; that is to say, as a red or yellow star, (often) with a face in it, under which type it was constantly represented in illumination; else it was kept out of the picture, or introduced in fragmentary distances, breaking through clouds with almost definite rays. Perhaps the honor of having first tried to represent the real effect of the sun in landscape belongs to Bonifazio, in his pictures of the camps of Israel.[101] Rubens followed in a kind of bravado, sometimes making the rays issue from anything but the orb of the sun;--here, for instance, Fig. 6., is an outline of the position of the sun (at _s_) with respect to his own rays, in a sunset behind a tournament in the Louvre: and various interesting effects of sunlight issuing from the conventional face-filled orb occur in contemporary missal-painting; for instance, very richly in the Harleian MS. Brit. Mus. 3469. But all this was merely indicative of the tendency to transition which may always be traced in any age before the man comes who is to _accomplish_ the transition. Claude took up the new idea seriously, made the sun his subject, and painted the effects of misty shadows cast by his rays over the landscape, and other delicate aerial transitions, as no one had ever done before, and, in some respects, as no one has done in oil color since.

-- 23. "But, how, if this were so, could his capacities be of the meanest order?" Because doing _one_ thing well, or better than others have done it, does not necessarily imply large capacity. Capacity means breadth of glance, understanding of the relations of things, and invention, and these are rare and precious; but there are very few men who have not done _something_, in the course of their lives, better than other people. I could point out many engravers, draughtsmen, and artists, who have each a particular merit in their manner, or particular field of perception, that n.o.body else has, or ever had. But this does not make them great men, it only indicates a small special capacity of some kind: and all the smaller if the gift be very peculiar and single; for a great man never so limits himself to one thing, as that we shall be able to say, "That's all he can do." If Claude had been a great man he would not have been so steadfastly set on painting effects of sun; he would have looked at all nature, and at all art, and would have painted sun effects somewhat worse, and nature universally much better.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 6.]

-- 24. Such as he was, however, his discovery of the way to make pictures look warm was very delightful to the shallow connoisseurs of the age. Not that they cared for suns.h.i.+ne; but they liked seeing jugglery. They could not feel t.i.tian's n.o.ble color, nor Veronese's n.o.ble composition; but they thought it highly amusing to see the sun brought into a picture: and Claude's works were bought and delighted in by vulgar people then, for their real-looking suns, as pictures are now by vulgar people for having real timepieces in their church towers.

-- 25. But when Turner arose, with an earnest desire to paint the whole of nature, he found that the existence of the sun was an important fact, and by no means an easily manageable one. _He_ loved suns.h.i.+ne for its own sake; but he could not at first paint it. Most things else, he would more or less manage without much technical difficulty; but the burning orb and the golden haze could not, somehow, be got out of the oil paint. Naturally he went to Claude, who really had got them out of oil paint; approached him with great reverence, as having done that which seemed to Turner most difficult of all technical matters, and he became his faithful disciple. How much he learned from him of manipulation, I cannot tell; but one thing is certain, that he never quite equalled him in that particular forte of his. I imagine that Claude's way of laying on oil color was so methodical that it could not possibly be imitated by a man whose mechanism was interfered with by hundreds of thoughts and aims totally different from Claude's; and, besides, I suppose that certain useful principles in the management of paint, of which our schools are now wholly ignorant, had come down as far as Claude, from the Venetians. Turner at last gave up the attempt, and adopted a manipulation of his own, which indeed effected certain objects attainable in no other way, but which still was in many respects unsatisfactory, dangerous, and deeply to be regretted.

-- 26. But meantime his mind had been strongly warped by Claude's futilities of conception. It was impossible to dwell on such works for any length of time without being grievously harmed by them; and the style of Turner's compositions was for ever afterwards weakened or corrupted. For, truly, it is almost beyond belief into what depth of absurdity Claude plunges continually in his most admired designs. For instance; undertaking to paint Moses at the Burning Bush, he represents a graceful landscape with a city, a river, and a bridge, and plenty of tall trees, and the sea, and numbers of people going about their business and pleasure in every direction; and the bush burning quietly upon a bank in the corner; rather in the dark, and not to be seen without close inspection. It would take some pages of close writing to point out, one by one, the inanities of heart, soul, and brain which such a conception involves; the ineffable ignorance of the nature of the event, and of the scene of it; the incapacity of conceiving anything even _in_ ignorance, which should be impressive; the dim, stupid, serene, leguminous enjoyment of his sunny afternoon--burn the bushes as much as they liked--these I leave the reader to think over at his leisure, either before the picture in Lord Ellesmere's gallery, or the sketch of it in the Liber Veritatis. But all these kinds of fallacy sprung more or less out of the vices of the time in which Claude lived; his own peculiar character reaches beyond these, to an incapacity of understanding the _main point_ in anything he had to represent, down to the minutest detail, which is quite unequalled, as far as I know, in human nugatoriness. For instance; here, in Fig. 7., is the head, with half the body, of Eneas drawing his Bow, from No. 180. of the Liber Veritatis. Observe, the string is too long by half; for if the bow were unbent, it would be two feet longer than the whole bow. Then the arrow is too long by half, has too heavy a head by half; and finally, it actually is _under_ the bow-hand, instead of above it. Of the ideal and heroic refinement of the head and drapery I will say nothing; but look only at the wretched archery, and consider if it would be possible for any child to draw the thing with less understanding, or to make more mistakes in the given compa.s.s.[102]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 7.]

-- 27. And yet, exquisite as is Claude's instinct for blunder, he has not strength of mind enough to blunder in a wholly original manner, but he must needs falter out of his way to pick up other people's puerilities, and be absurd at second-hand. I have been obliged to laugh a little--though I hope reverently--at Ghirlandajo's landscapes, which yet we saw had a certain charm of quaintness in them when contrasted with his grand figures; but could any one have believed that Claude, with all the n.o.ble landscapes of t.i.tian set before him, and all nature round about him, should yet go back to Ghirlandajo for types of form. Yet such is the case. I said that the Venetian influence came dimly down to Claude; but the old Florentine influence came clearly. The Claudesque landscape is not, as so commonly supposed, an idealized abstract of the nature about Rome.