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all ages be, to those who have thorough love and knowledge of the creation which they libel, instructive proofs of the limited number and low character of the truths which are necessary, and the accumulated multitude of pure, broad, bold falsehoods which are admissible in pictures meant only to deceive.

There is of course more or less accuracy of knowledge and execution combined with this aim at effect, according to the industry and precision of eye possessed by the master, and more or less of beauty in the forms selected, according to his natural taste; but both the beauty and truth are sacrificed unhesitatingly where they interfere with the great effort at deception. Claude had, if it had been cultivated, a fine feeling for beauty of form, and is seldom ungraceful in his foliage; but his picture, when examined with reference to essential truth, is one mass of error from beginning to end. Cuyp, on the other hand, could paint close truth of everything, except ground and water, with decision and success, but he has no sense of beauty. Gaspar Poussin, more ignorant of truth than Claude, and almost as dead to beauty as Cuyp, has yet a perception of the feeling and moral truth of nature which often redeems the picture; but yet in all of them, everything that they can do is done for deception, and nothing for the sake or love of what they are painting.

§ 4. The principles of selection adopted by

modern artists.

Modern landscape painters have looked at nature with totally different eyes, seeking not for what is easiest to imitate, but for what is most important to tell. Rejecting at once all idea of bona fide imitation, they think only of conveying the impression of nature into the mind of the spectator. And there is, in consequence, a greater sum of valuable, essential, and impressive truth in the works of two or three of our leading modern landscape painters, than in those of all the old masters put together, and of truth too, nearly unmixed with definite or avoidable falsehood; while the unimportant and feeble truths of the old masters are choked with a mass of perpetual defiance of the most authoritative laws of nature.

I do not expect this assertion to be believed at present; it must rest for demonstration on the examination' we are about to enter upon; yet, even without reference to any intricate or

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-laid truths, it appears strange to me, that any one familiar nature, and fond of her, should not grow weary and sick at heart among the melancholy and monotonous Claude, transcripts of her which alone can be received from the old school of art. A man accustomed to the broad, wild sea-shore, with its bright breakers, and free winds, and sounding rocks, and eternal sensaof tameless power, can scarcely but be angered when Claude him stand still on some paltry, chipped and chiselled quay porters and wheelbarrows running against him, to watch a k, rippling bound and barriered water, that has not strength ugh in one of its waves to upset the flower-pots on the wall, ven to fling one jet of spray over the confining stone. accustomed to the strength and glory of God's mountains, their soaring and radiant pinnacles, and surging sweeps of sureless distance, kingdoms in their valleys, and climates n their crests, can scarcely but be angered when Salvator him stand still under some contemptible fragment of splincrag, which an Alpine snow-wreath would smother in its swell, with a stunted bush or two growing out of it, and a me of manufactory smoke for a sky. A man accustomed to grace and infinity of nature's foliage, with every vista a nedral, and every bough a revelation, can scarcely but be ered when Poussin mocks him with a black round mass of enetrable paint, diverging into feathers instead of leaves, supported on a stick instead of a trunk. The fact is, there

ne thing wanting in all the doing of these men, and that is very virtue by which the work of human mind chiefly rises ve that of the Daguerreotype or Calotype, or any other chanical means that ever have been or may be invented, we: There is no evidence of their ever having gone to nature h any thirst, or received from her such emotion as could ke them, even for an instant, lose sight of themselves; there n them neither earnestness nor humility; there is no simor honest record of any single truth; none of the plain rds nor straight efforts that men speak and make when they ce feel.

Nor is it only by the professed landscape painters that the at verities of the material world are betrayed: Grand as are

the motives of landscape in the works of the earlier and mightier men, there is yet in them nothing approaching to a general view nor complete rendering of natural phenom

§ 6. Inadequacy of the landscape of Titian and Tintoret.

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not that they are to be blamed for this; for they took out of nature that which was fit for their purpose, and their mission was to do no more; but we must be cautious to distinguish that imaginative abstraction of landscape which alone we find in them, from the entire statement of truth which has been attempted by the moderns. I have said in the chapter on symmetry in the second volume, that all landscape grandeur vanishes before that of Titian and Tintoret; and this is true of whatever these two giants touched; -but they touched little. A few level flakes of chestnut foliage; a blue abstraction of hill forms from Cadore or the Euganeans; a grand mass or two of glowing ground and mighty herbage, and a few burning fields of quiet cloud were all they needed; there is evidence of Tintoret's having felt more than this, but it occurs only in secondary fragments of rock, cloud, or pine, hardly noticed among the accumulated interest of his human subject. From the window of Titian's house at Venice, the chain of the Tyrolese Alps is seen lifted in spectral power above the tufted plain of Treviso ; every dawn that reddens the towers of Murano lights also a line of pyramidal fires along that colossal ridge; but there is, so far as I know, no evidence in any of the master's works of his ever having beheld, much less felt, the majesty of their burning. The dark firmament and saddened twilight of Tintoret are sufficient for their end; but the sun never plunges behind San Giorgio in Aliga without such retinue of radiant cloud, such rest of zoned light on the green lagoon, as never received image from his hand. More than this, of that which they loved and rendered much is rendered conventionally; by noble conventionalities indeed, but such nevertheless as would be inexcusable if the landscape became the principal subject instead of an accompaniment. will instance only the San Pietro Martire, which, if not the most perfect, is at least the most popular of Titian's landscapes; in which, to obtain light on the flesh of the near figures the sky is made as dark as deep sea, the mountains are laid in with violent and impossible blue, except one of them on the

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hich, to connect the distant light with the foreground, own into light relief, unexplained by its materials, unin its position, and in its degree impossible under any

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I do not instance these as faults in the picture : nfluence there are no works of very powerful color which are free from conventionality concentrated or ed, daring or disguised; but as the conventionality of this picture is mainly thrown into the landscape, it is neceswhile we acknowledge the virtue of this distance as a f the great composition, to be on our guard against the e it assumes and the attractiveness of its overcharged color. nents of far purer truth occur in the works of Tintoret ; n the drawing of foliage, whether rapid or elaborate, of s or details, the Venetian painters, taken as a body, may sidered almost faultless models. But the whole field of they have done is so narrow, and therein is so much of is only relatively right, and in itself false or imperfect, he young and inexperienced painter could run no greater han the too early taking them for teachers; and to the al spectator their landscape is valuable rather as a means of iar and solemn emotion than as ministering to, or inspirhe universal love of nature. Hence while men of serious , especially those whose pursuits have brought them into nued relations with the peopled rather than the lonely 1, will always look to the Venetian painters as having ned those simple chords of landscape harmony which are in unison with earnest and melancholy feeling; thosee philosophy is more cheerful and more extended, as having trained and colored among simple and solitary nature, will for a wider and more systematic circle of teaching: they grant that the barred horizontal gloom of the Titian sky, the massy leaves of the Titian forest are among the most me of the conceivable forms of material things; but they w that the virtue of these very forms is to be learned only ght comparison of them with the cheerfulness, fulness and parative inquietness of other hours and scenes; that they not intended for the continual food, but the occasional hing of the human heart; that there is a lesson of not less

value in its place, though of less concluding and sealing authority, in every one of the more humble phases of material things and that there are some lessons of equal or greater authority which these masters neither taught nor received. And until the school of modern landscape arose Art had never noted the links of this mighty chain; it mattered not that a fragment lay here and there, no heavenly lightning could descend by it; the landscape of the Venetians was without effect on any contemporary in subsequent schools; it still remains on the continent as useless as if it had never existed; and at this moment German and Italian landscapes, of which no words are scornful enough to befit the utter degradation, hang in the Venetian Academy in the next room to the Desert of Titian and the Paradise of Tintoret.*

§ 8. The value of

art how estimated.

That then which I would have the reader in

inferior works of quire respecting every work of art of undetermined merit submitted to his judgment, is not whether it be a work of especial grandeur, importance, or power; but whether it have any virtue or substance as a link in this chain of truth, whether it have recorded or interpreted anything before unknown, whether it have added one single stone to our heaven-pointing pyramid, cut away one dark bough, or levelled one rugged hillock in our path. This, if it be an honest work of art, it must have done, for no man ever yet worked honestly without giving some such help to his race. God appoints to every one of his creatures a separate mission, and if they discharge it honorably, if they quit themselves like inen and faithfully follow that light which is in them, withdrawing from it all cold and quenching influence, there will assuredly come of it such burning as, in its appointed mode and measure, shall shine before men, and be of service constant and holy. Degrees infinite of lustre there must always be, but the weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him,

*Not the large Paradise, but the Fall of Adam, a small picture chiefly in brown and gray, near Titian's Assumption. Its companion, the Death of Abel, is remarkable as containing a group of trees which Turner, I believe accidentally, has repeated nearly mass for mass in the "Marly." Both are among the most noble works of this or any other master, whether for preciousness of color or energy of thought.

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