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 м, 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 noble 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 assured 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 assuredly apprehended, and the instinct assuredly 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.* § 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. † 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 * An anecdote is related, more to our present purpose, and better authenticated, inasmuch as the name of the artist to whom Turner was speaking at the time is commonly stated, though I do not give it here, not having asked his permission. The story runs that this artist (one of our leading landscape painters) was complaining to Turner that, after going to Domo d'Ossola, to find the site of a particular view which had struck him several years before, he had entirely failed in doing so ; it looked different when he went back again." "What," replied Turner, "do you not know yet, at your age, that you ought to paint your impressions?" So, in the exact length or shape of shadows in general, he will often be found quite inaccurate; because the irregularity caused in shadows by the shape of what they fall on, as well as what they fall from, renders the law of connection untraceable by the eye or the instinct. The chief visible thing about a shadow is, that it is always of some form which nobody would have thought of; and this visible principle Turner always seizes, sometimes wrongly in calculated fact, but always so rightly as to give more the look of a real shadow than any one else. he knows anything of geology, but because he instinctively seizes the last and finest traces of any visible law. § 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 FIG. 72. by the continuous line in the figure, thus treating it just as we saw Titian 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 principal 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. CHAPTER XVI. RESULTING FORMS:-THIRDLY, PRECIPICES. § 1. THE reader was, perhaps, surprised by the smallness of the number to which our foregoing analysis reduced Alpine summits bearing an ascertainedly peaked or pyramidal form. He might not be less so if I were to number the very few occasions on which I have seen a true precipice of any considerable height. I mean by a true precipice, one by which a plumbline will swing clear, or without touching the face of it, if suspended from a point a foot or two beyond the brow. Not only are perfect precipices of this kind very rare, but even imperfect precipices, which often produce upon the eye as majestic an impression as if they were vertical, are nearly always curiously low in proportion to the general mass of the hills to which they belong. They are for the most part small steps or rents in large surfaces of mountain, and mingled by Nature among her softer forms, as cautiously and sparingly as the utmost exertion of his voice is, by a great speaker, with his tones of gentleness. § 2. Precipices, in the large plurality of cases, consist of the edge of a bed of rock, sharply fractured, in the manner already explained in Chap. XII., and are represented, in their connection with aiguilles and crests, by c, in Fig. 42, p. 195. When b the bed of rock slopes backwards from the edge, as a, Fig. 73, a condition of precipice is obtained more or less peaked, very safe, and very grand.* When the beds are horizontal, b, the precipice is steeper, more dangerous, but much less impressive. When the beds slope towards the precipice, the front of * Distinguished from a crest by being the face of a large continuous bed of rock, not the end of a ridge. it overhangs, and the noblest effect is obtained which is possible in mountain forms of this kind. § 3. Singularly enough, the type b is in actual nature nearly always the most dangerous of the three, and c the safest, for horizontal beds are usually of the softest rocks, and their cliffs are caused by some violent agency in constant operation, as chalk cliffs by the wearing power of the sea, so that such rocks are continually falling, in one place or another. The form a may also be assumed by very soft rocks. But c cannot exist at all on the large scale, unless it is built of good materials, and it will then frequently stay in its fixed frown for ages. § 4. It occasionally happens that a precipice is formed among the higher crests by the sides of vertical beds of slaty crystallines. Such rocks are rare, and never very high, but always beautiful in their smoothness of surface and general trenchant and firm expression. One of the most interesting I know is that of the summit of the Breven, on the north of the valley of Chamouni. The mountain is formed by vertical sheets of slaty crystallines, rather soft at the bottom, and getting harder and harder towards the top, until at the very summit it is hard and compact as the granite of Waterloo Bridge, though much finer in the grain, and breaking into perpendicular faces of rock. so perfectly cut as to feel smooth to the hand. Fig. 4, p. 107, represents, of the real size, a bit which I broke from the edge of the cliff, the shaded part underneath being the surface which forms the precipice. The plumb-line from the brow of this cliff hangs clear 124 English feet; it is then caught by a ledge about three feet wide, from which another precipice falls to about twice the height of the first; but I had not line enough to measure it with from the top, and could not get down to the ledge. When I say the line hangs clear, I mean when once it is off the actual brow of the cliff, which is a little rounded for about fourteen or fifteen feet, from a to b, in the section, Fig. 75. Then the rock recedes in an almost unbroken concave sweep, detaching itself from the plumb-line about two feet at the point c (the lateral dimensions are exaggerated to show the curve), and approaching it again at the ledge d, which is 124 feet below a. The plumb-line, fortunately, can be seen throughout its whole extent from a sharp bastion of the precipice |