But it is not the outline only which is thus systematically false. The drawing of the solid form is worse still, for it is to be remembered that although clouds of course arrange themselves more or less into broad ma.s.ses, with a light side and dark side, both their light and shade are invariably composed of a series of divided ma.s.ses, each of which has in its outline as much variety and character as the great outline of the cloud; presenting, therefore, a thousand times repeated, all that I have described as characteristic of the general form. Nor are these mult.i.tudinous divisions a truth of slight importance in the character of sky, for they are dependent on, and ill.u.s.trative of, a quality which is usually in a great degree overlooked,--the enormous retiring s.p.a.ces of solid clouds. Between the illumined edge of a heaped cloud, and that part of its body which turns into shadow, there will generally be a clear distance of several miles, more or less of course, according to the general size of the cloud, but in such large ma.s.ses as in Poussin and others of the old masters, occupy the fourth or fifth of the visible sky; the clear illumined breadth of vapor, from the edge to the shadow, involves at least a distance of five or six miles. We are little apt, in watching the changes of a mountainous range of cloud, to reflect that the ma.s.ses of vapor which compose it, are huger and higher than any mountain range of the earth; and the distances between ma.s.s and ma.s.s are not yards of air traversed in an instant by the flying form, but valleys of changing atmosphere leagues over; that the slow motion of ascending curves, which we can scarcely trace, is a boiling energy of exulting vapor rushing into the heaven a thousand feet in a minute; and that the toppling angle whose sharp edge almost escapes notice in the mult.i.tudinous forms around it, is a nodding precipice of storms, 3000 feet from base to summit. It is not until we have actually compared the forms of the sky with the hill ranges of the earth, and seen the soaring Alp overtopped and buried in one surge of the sky, that we begin to conceive or appreciate the colossal scale of the phenomena of the latter. But of this there can be no doubt in the mind of any one accustomed to trace the forms of clouds among hill ranges--as it is there a demonstrable and evident fact, that the s.p.a.ce of vapor visibly extended over an ordinarily cloudy sky, is not less, from the point nearest to the observer to the horizon, than twenty leagues; that the size of every ma.s.s of separate form, if it be at all largely divided, is to be expressed in terms of _miles_; and that every boiling heap of illuminated mist in the nearer sky, is an enormous mountain, fifteen or twenty thousand feet in height, six or seven miles over an illuminated surface, furrowed by a thousand colossal ravines, torn by local tempests into peaks and promontories, and changing its features with the majestic velocity of the volcano.

-- 11. And consequent divisions and varieties of feature.

To those who have once convinced themselves of these proportions of the heaven, it will be immediately evident, that though we might, without much violation of truth, omit the minor divisions of a cloud four yards over, it is the veriest audacity of falsehood to omit those of ma.s.ses where for yards we have to read miles; first, because it is physically impossible that such a s.p.a.ce should be without many and vast divisions; secondly, because divisions at such distances must be sharply and forcibly marked by aerial perspective, so that not only they must be there, but they must be visible and evident to the eye; and thirdly, because these mult.i.tudinous divisions are absolutely necessary, in order to express this s.p.a.ce and distance, which cannot but be fully and imperfectly felt, even with every aid and evidence that art can give of it.

-- 12. Not lightly to be omitted.

Now if an artist taking for his subject a chain of vast mountains, several leagues long, were to unite all their varieties of ravine, crag, chasm, and precipice, into one solid, unbroken ma.s.s, with one light side and one dark side, looking like a white ball or parallelopiped two yards broad, the words "breadth," "boldness," or, "generalization," would scarcely be received as a sufficient apology for a proceeding so glaringly false, and so painfully degrading. But when, instead of the really large and simple forms of mountains, united, as they commonly are, by some great principle of common organization, and so closely resembling each other as often to correspond in line, and join in effect; when instead of this, we have to do with s.p.a.ces of cloud twice as vast, broken up into a multiplicity of forms necessary to, and characteristic of, their very nature--those forms subject to a thousand local changes, having no a.s.sociation with each other, and rendered visible in a thousand places by their own transparency or cavities, where the mountain forms would be lost in shade,--that this far greater s.p.a.ce, and this far more complicated arrangement, should be all summed up into one round ma.s.s, with one swell of white, and one flat side of unbroken gray, is considered an evidence of the sublimest powers in the artist of generalization and breadth. Now it may be broad, it may be grand, it may be beautiful, artistical, and in every way desirable. I don't say it is not--I merely say it is a concentration of every kind of falsehood: it is depriving heaven of its s.p.a.ce, clouds of their buoyancy, winds of their motion, and distance of its blue.

-- 13. Imperfect conceptions of this size and extent in ancient landscape.

This is done, more or less, by all the old masters, without an exception.[32] Their idea of clouds was altogether similar; more or less perfectly carried out, according to their power of hand and accuracy of eye, but universally the same in conception. It was the idea of a comparatively small, round, puffed-up white body, irregularly a.s.sociated with other round and puffed-up white bodies, each with a white light side, and a gray dark side, and a soft reflected light, floating a great way below a blue dome. Such is the idea of a cloud formed by most people; it is the first, general, uncultivated notion of what we see every day. People think of the clouds as about as large as they look--forty yards over, perhaps; they see generally that they are solid bodies subject to the same laws as other solid bodies, roundish, whitish, and apparently suspended a great way under a high blue concavity. So that these ideas be tolerably given with smooth paint, they are content, and call it nature. How different it is from anything that nature ever did, or ever will do, I have endeavored to show; but I cannot, and do not, expect the contrast to be fully felt, unless the reader will actually go out on days when, either before or after rain, the clouds arrange themselves into vigorous ma.s.ses, and after arriving at something like a conception of their distance and size, from the mode in which they retire over the horizon, will for himself trace and watch their varieties of form and outline, as ma.s.s rises over ma.s.s in their illuminated bodies. Let him climb from step to step over their craggy and broken slopes, let him plunge into the long vistas of immeasurable perspective, that guide back to the blue sky; and when he finds his imagination lost in their immensity, and his senses confused with their mult.i.tude, let him go to Claude, to Salvator, or to Poussin, and ask them for a like s.p.a.ce, or like infinity.

-- 14. Total want of transparency and evanescence in the clouds of ancient landscape.

But perhaps the most grievous fault of all, in the clouds of these painters, is the utter want of transparency. Not in her most ponderous and lightless ma.s.ses will nature ever leave us without some evidence of transmitted sunshine; and she perpetually gives us pa.s.sages in which the vapor becomes visible only by the sunshine which it arrests and holds within itself, not caught on its surface, but entangled in its ma.s.s--floating fleeces, precious with the gold of heaven; and this translucency is especially indicated on the dark sides even of her heaviest wreaths, which possess opalescent and delicate hues of partial illumination, far more dependent upon the beams which pa.s.s through them than on those which are reflected upon them. Nothing, on the contrary, can be more painfully and ponderously opaque than the clouds of the old masters universally. However far removed in aerial distance, and however brilliant in light, they never appear filmy or evanescent, and their light is always on them, not in them. And this effect is much increased by the positive and persevering determination on the part of their outlines not to be broken in upon, nor interfered with in the slightest degree, by any presumptuous blue, or impertinent winds. There is no inequality, no variation, no losing or disguising of line, no melting into nothingness, nor shattering into spray; edge succeeds edge with imperturbable equanimity, and nothing short of the most decided interference on the part of tree-tops, or the edge of the picture, prevents us from being able to follow them all the way round, like the coast of an island.

-- 15. Farther proof of their deficiency in s.p.a.ce.

-- 16. Instance of perfect truth in the sky of Turner's Babylon.

And be it remembered that all these faults and deficiencies are to be found in their drawing merely of the separate ma.s.ses of the solid c.u.mulus, the easiest drawn of all clouds. But nature scarcely ever confines herself to such ma.s.ses; they form but the thousandth part of her variety of effect. She builds up a pyramid of their boiling volumes, bars this across like a mountain with the gray cirrus, envelops it in black, ragged, drifting vapor, covers the open part of the sky with mottled horizontal fields, breaks through these with sudden and long sunbeams, tears up their edges with local winds, scatters over the gaps of blue the infinity of mult.i.tude of the high cirri, and melts even the unoccupied azure into palpitating shades. And all this is done over and over again in every quarter of a mile. Where Poussin or Claude have three similar ma.s.ses, nature has fifty pictures, made up each of millions of minor thoughts--fifty aisles penetrating through angelic chapels to the Shechinah of the blue--fifty hollow ways among bewildered hills--each with their own nodding rocks, and cloven precipices, and radiant summits, and robing vapors, but all unlike each other, except in beauty, all bearing witness to the unwearied, exhaustless operation of the Infinite Mind. Now, in cases like these especially, as we observed before of general nature, though it is altogether hopeless to follow out in the s.p.a.ce of any one picture this incalculable and inconceivable glory, yet the painter can at least see that the s.p.a.ce he has at his command, narrow and confined as it is, is made complete use of, and that no part of it shall be without entertainment and food for thought. If he could subdivide it by millionths of inches, he could not reach the mult.i.tudinous majesty of nature; but it is at least inc.u.mbent upon him to make the most of what he has, and not, by exaggerating the proportions, banishing the variety and repeating the forms of his clouds, to set at defiance the eternal principles of the heavens--fitfulness and infinity. And now let us, keeping in memory what we have seen of Poussin and Salvator, take up one of Turner's skies, and see whether _he_ is as narrow in his conception, or as n.i.g.g.ardly in his s.p.a.ce. It does not matter which we take, his sublime Babylon[33] is a fair example for our present purpose. Ten miles away, down the Euphrates, where it gleams last along the plain, he gives us a drift of dark elongated vapor, melting beneath into a dim haze which embraces the hills on the horizon. It is exhausted with its own motion, and broken up by the wind in its own body into numberless groups of billowy and tossing fragments, which, beaten by the weight of storm down to the earth, are just lifting themselves again on wearied wings, and perishing in the effort. Above these, and far beyond them, the eye goes back to a broad sea of white, illuminated mist, or rather cloud melted into rain, and absorbed again before that rain has fallen, but penetrated throughout, whether it be vapor or whether it be dew, with soft sunshine, turning it as white as snow. Gradually as it rises, the rainy fusion ceases, you cannot tell where the film of blue on the left begins--but it is deepening, deepening still,--and the cloud, with its edge first invisible, then all but imaginary, then just felt when the eye is _not_ fixed on it, and lost when it is, at last rises, keen from excessive distance, but soft and mantling in its body, as a swan's bosom fretted by faint wind, heaving fitfully against the delicate deep blue, with white waves, whose forms are traced by the pale lines of opalescent shadow, shade only because the light is within it, and not upon it, and which break with their own swiftness into a driven line of level spray, winnowed into threads by the wind, and flung before the following vapor like those swift shafts of arrowy water which a great cataract shoots into the air beside it, trying to find the earth. Beyond these, again, rises a colossal mountain of gray c.u.mulus, through whose shadowed sides the sunbeams penetrate in dim, sloping, rain-like shafts; and over which they fall in a broad burst of streaming light, sinking to the earth, and showing through their own visible radiance the three successive ranges of hills which connect its desolate plain with s.p.a.ce. Above, the edgy summit of the c.u.mulus, broken into fragments, recedes into the sky, which is peopled in its serenity with quiet mult.i.tudes of the white, soft, silent cirrus; and under these again, drift near the zenith, disturbed and impatient shadows of a darker spirit, seeking rest and finding none.

-- 17. And in his Pools of Solomon.

Now this is nature! It is the exhaustless living energy with which the universe is filled; and what will you set beside it of the works of other men? Show me a single picture, in the whole compa.s.s of ancient art, in which I can pa.s.s from cloud to cloud, from region to region, from first to second and third heaven, as I can here, and you may talk of Turner's want of truth. Turn to the Pools of Solomon, and walk through the pa.s.sages of mist as they melt on the one hand into those stormy fragments of fiery cloud, or, on the other, into the cold solitary shadows that compa.s.s the sweeping hill, and when you find an inch without air and transparency, and a hairbreadth without changefulness and thought; and when you can count the torn waves of tossing radiance that gush from the sun, as you can count the fixed, white, insipidities of Claude; or when you can measure the modulation and the depth of that hollow mist, as you can the flourishes of the brush upon the canvas of Salvator, talk of Turner's want of truth!

But let us take up simpler and less elaborate works, for there is too much in these to admit of being a.n.a.lyzed.

-- 18. Truths of outline and character in his Como.

In the vignette of the Lake of Como, in Rogers's Italy, the s.p.a.ce is so small that the details have been partially lost by the engraver; but enough remain to ill.u.s.trate the great principles of cloud from which we have endeavored to explain. Observe first the general angular outline of the volumes on the left of the sun. If you mark the points where the direction of their outline changes, and connect those points by right lines, the cloud will touch, but will not cut, those lines throughout.

Yet its contour is as graceful as it is full of character--toppling, ready to change--fragile as enormous--evanescent as colossal. Observe how, where it crosses the line of the sun, it becomes luminous, ill.u.s.trating what has been observed of the visibility of mist in sunlight. Observe, above all, the multiplicity of its solid form, the depth of its shadows in perpetual transition: it is not round and swelled, half light and half dark, but full of breaking irregular shadow and transparency--variable as the wind, and melting imperceptibly above into the haziness of the sunlighted atmosphere, contrasted in all its vast forms with the delicacy and the mult.i.tude of the brightly touched cirri. Nothing can surpa.s.s the truth of this; the cloud is as gigantic in its simplicity as the Alp which it opposes; but how various, how transparent, how infinite in its organization!

-- 19. a.s.sociation of the cirrostratus with the c.u.mulus.

I would draw especial attention, both here and in all other works of Turner, to the beautiful use of the low horizontal bars or fields of cloud, (cirrostratus,) which a.s.sociate themselves so frequently--more especially before storms--with the true c.u.mulus, floating on its flanks, or capping it, as if it were a mountain, and seldom mingling with its substance, unless in the very formation of rain. They supply us with one of those beautiful instances of natural composition, by which the artist is superseded and excelled--for, by the occurrence of these horizontal flakes, the rolling form of the c.u.mulus is both opposed in its princ.i.p.al lines, and gifted with an apparent solidity and vastness, which no other expedient could have exhibited, and which far exceed in awfulness the impression of the n.o.blest mountains of the earth. I have seen in the evening light of Italy, the Alps themselves out-towered by ranges of these mighty clouds, alternately white in the starlight, and inhabited by fire.

-- 20. The deep-based knowledge of the Alps in Turner's Lake of Geneva.

Turn back to the first vignette in the Italy. The angular outlines and variety of modulation in the clouds above the sail, and the delicate atmosphere of morning into which they are dissolved about the breathing hills, require no comment; but one part of this vignette demands especial notice; it is the repet.i.tion of the outline of the snowy mountain by the light cloud above it. The cause of this I have already explained (vide page 228,) and its occurrence here is especially valuable as bearing witness to the thorough and scientific knowledge thrown by Turner into his slightest works. The thing cannot be seen once in six months; it would not have been noticed, much less introduced by an ordinary artist, and to the public it is a dead letter, or an offence. Ninety-nine persons in a hundred would not have observed this pale wreath of parallel cloud above the hill, and the hundredth in all probability says it is unnatural. It requires the most intimate and accurate knowledge of the Alps before such a piece of refined truth can be understood.

-- 21. Further principles of cloud form exemplified in his Amalfi.

At the 216th page we have another and a new case, in which clouds in perfect repose, unaffected by wind, or any influence but that of their own elastic force, boil, rise, and melt in the heaven with more approach to globular form than under any other circ.u.mstances is possible. I name this vignette, not only because it is most remarkable for the buoyancy and elasticity of inward energy, indicated through the most ponderous forms, and affords us a beautiful instance of the junction of the cirrostratus with the c.u.mulus, of which we have just been speaking (-- 19,) but because it is a characteristic example of Turner's use of one of the facts of nature not hitherto noticed, that the edge of a partially transparent body is often darker than its central surface, because at the edge the light penetrates and pa.s.ses through, which from the centre is reflected to the eye. The sharp, cutting edge of a wave, if not broken into foam, frequently appears for an instant almost black; and the outlines of these ma.s.sy clouds, where their projecting forms rise in relief against the light of their bodies, are almost always marked clearly and firmly by very dark edges. Hence we have frequently, if not constantly, mult.i.tudinous forms indicated only by outline, giving character and solidity to the great ma.s.ses of light, without taking away from their breadth. And Turner avails himself of these boldly and constantly,--outlining forms with the brush of which no other indication is given. All the grace and solidity of the white cloud on the right-hand side of the vignette before us, depends upon such outlines.

-- 22. Reasons for insisting on the _infinity_ of Turner's works.

Infinity is almost an unerring test of _all_ truth.

As I before observed of mere execution, that one of the best tests of its excellence was the expression of _infinity_; so it may be noticed with respect to the painting of details generally, that more difference lies between one artist and another, in the attainment of this quality, than in any other of the efforts of art; and that if we wish, without reference to beauty of composition, or any other interfering circ.u.mstances, to form a judgment of the truth of painting, perhaps the very first thing we should look for, whether in one thing or another--foliage, or clouds, or waves--should be the expression of _infinity_ always and everywhere, in all parts and divisions of parts.

For we may be quite sure that what is not infinite, cannot be true; it does not, indeed, follow that what is infinite, always is true, but it cannot be altogether false, for this simple reason; that it is impossible for mortal mind to compose an infinity of any kind for itself, or to form an idea of perpetual variation, and to avoid all repet.i.tion, merely by its own combining resources. The moment that we trust to ourselves, we repeat ourselves, and therefore the moment we see in a work of any kind whatsoever, the expression of infinity, we may be certain that the workman has gone to nature for it; while, on the other hand, the moment we see repet.i.tion, or want of infinity, we may be certain that the workman has _not_ gone to nature for it.

-- 23. Instances of the total want of it in the works of Salvator.

-- 24. And of the universal presence of it in those of Turner. The conclusions which may be arrived at from it.

-- 25. The multiplication of objects, or increase of their size, will not give the impression of infinity, but is the resource of novices.

For instance, in the picture of Salvator before noticed, No. 220 in the Dulwich Gallery, as we see at once that the two ma.s.ses of cloud absolutely repeat each other in every one of their forms, and that each is composed of about twelve white sweeps of the brush, all forming the same curve, and all of the same length; and as we can count these, and measure their common diameter, and by stating the same to anybody else, convey to him a full and perfect idea and knowledge of that sky in all its parts and proportions,--as we can do this, we may be absolutely certain, without reference to the real sky, or to any other part of nature, without even knowing what the white things were intended for, we may be certain that they cannot possibly resemble _anything_; that whatever they were meant for, they can be nothing but a violent contradiction of all nature's principles and forms. When, on the other hand, we take up such a sky as that of Turner's Rouen, seen from St.

Catherine's Hill, in the Rivers of France, and find, in the first place, that he has given us a distance over the hills in the horizon, into which, when we are tired of penetrating, we must turn and come back again, there being not the remotest chance of getting to the end of it; and when we see that from this measureless distance up to the zenith, the whole sky is one ocean of alternate waves of cloud and light, so blended together that the eye cannot rest on any one without being guided to the next, and so to a hundred more, till it is lost over and over again in every wreath--that if it divides the sky into quarters of inches, and tries to count or comprehend the component parts of any single one of those divisions, it is still as utterly defied and defeated by the part as by the whole--that there is not one line out of the millions there which repeats another, not one which is unconnected with another, not one which does not in itself convey histories of distance and s.p.a.ce, and suggest new and changeful form; then we may be all but certain, though these forms are too mysterious and too delicate for us to a.n.a.lyze--though all is so crowded and so connected that it is impossible to test any single part by particular laws--yet without any such tests, we may be sure that this infinity can only be based on truth--that it _must_ be nature, because man could not have originated it, and that every form must be faithful, because none is like another.

And therefore it is that I insist so constantly on this great quality of landscape painting, as it appears in Turner; because it is not merely a constant and most important truth in itself, but it almost amounts to a demonstration of every other truth. And it will be found a far rarer attainment in the works of other men than is commonly supposed, and the sign, wherever it is really found, of the very highest art. For we are apt to forget that the greatest _number_ is no nearer infinity than the least, if it be definite number; and the vastest bulk is no nearer infinity than the most minute, if it be definite bulk; so that a man may multiply his objects forever and ever, and be no nearer infinity than he had reached with one, if he do not vary them and confuse them; and a man may reach infinity in every touch and line, and part, and unit, if in these he be truthfully various and obscure. And we shall find, the more we examine the works of the old masters, that always, and in all parts, they are totally wanting in every feeling of infinity, and therefore in _all_ truth: and even in the works of the moderns, though the aim is far more just, we shall frequently perceive an erroneous choice of means, and a subst.i.tution of mere number or bulk for real infinity.

-- 26. Farther instances of infinity in the gray skies of Turner.

And therefore, in concluding our notice of the central cloud region, I should wish to dwell particularly on those skies of Turner's, in which we have the whole s.p.a.ce of the heaven covered with the delicate dim flakes of gathering vapor, which are the intermediate link between the central region and that of the rain-cloud, and which a.s.semble and grow out of the air; shutting up the heaven with a gray interwoven veil, before the approach of storm, faint, but universal, letting the light of the upper sky pa.s.s pallidly through their body, but never rending a pa.s.sage for the ray. We have the first approach and gathering of this kind of sky most gloriously given in the vignette at page 115 of Rogers's Italy, which is one of the most perfect pieces of feeling (if I may transgress my usual rules for an instant) extant in art, owing to the extreme grandeur and stern simplicity of the strange and ominous forms of level cloud behind the building. In that at page 223, there are pa.s.sages of the same kind, of exceeding perfection. The sky through which the dawn is breaking in the Voyage of Columbus, and that with the Moonlight under the Rialto, in Rogers's Poems, the skies of the Bethlehem, and the Pyramids in Finden's Bible series, and among the Academy pictures, that of the Hero and Leander, and Flight into Egypt, are characteristic and n.o.ble examples, as far as any individual works can be characteristic of the universality of this mighty mind. I ought not to forget the magnificent solemnity and fulness of the wreaths of gathering darkness in the Folkestone.

-- 27. The excellence of the cloud-drawing of Stanfield.

-- 28. The average standing of the English school.

We must not pa.s.s from the consideration of the central cloud region without noticing the general high quality of the cloud-drawing of Stanfield. He is limited in his range, and is apt in extensive compositions to repeat himself, neither is he ever very refined; but his cloud-form is firmly and fearlessly chiselled, with perfect knowledge, though usually with some want of feeling. As far as it goes, it is very grand and very tasteful, beautifully developed in the s.p.a.ce of its solid parts and full of action. Next to Turner, he is incomparably the n.o.blest master of cloud-form of all our artists; in fact, he is the only one among them who really can _draw_ a cloud. For it is a very different thing to rub out an irregular white s.p.a.ce neatly with the handkerchief, or to leave a bright little bit of paper in the middle of a wash, and to give the real anatomy of cloud-form with perfect articulation of chiaroscuro. We have mult.i.tudes of painters who can throw a light bit of straggling vapor across their sky, or leave in it delicate and tender pa.s.sages of breaking light; but this is a very different thing from taking up each of those bits or pa.s.sages, and giving it structure, and parts, and solidity. The eye is satisfied with exceedingly little, as an indication of cloud, and a few clever sweeps of the brush on wet paper may give all that it requires; but this is not _drawing_ clouds, nor will it ever appeal fully and deeply to the mind, except when it occurs only as a part of a higher system. And there is not one of our modern artists, except Stanfield, who can do much more than this. As soon as they attempt to lay detail upon their clouds, they appear to get bewildered, forget that they are dealing with forms regulated by precisely the same simple laws of light and shade as more substantial matter, overcharge their color, confuse their shadows and dark sides, and end in mere ragged confusion. I believe the evil arises from their never attempting to render clouds except with the brush; other objects, at some period of study, they take up with the chalk or lead, and so learn something of their form; but they appear to consider clouds as altogether dependent on cobalt and camel's hair, and so never understand anything of their real anatomy. But whatever the cause, I cannot point to any central clouds of the moderns, except those of Turner and Stanfield, as really showing much knowledge of, or feeling for, nature, though _all_ are superior to the conventional and narrow conceptions of the ancients. We are all right as far as we go, our work may be incomplete, but it is not false; and it is far better, far less injurious to the mind, that we should be little attracted to the sky, and taught to be satisfied with a light suggestion of truthful form, than that we should be drawn to it by violently p.r.o.nounced outline and intense color, to find in its finished falsehood everything to displease or to mislead--to hurt our feelings, if we have foundation for them, and corrupt them, if we have none.

FOOTNOTES

[32] Here I include even the great ones--even t.i.tian and Veronese,--excepting only Tintoret and the religious schools.

[33] Engraved in Findel's Bible Ill.u.s.trations.

CHAPTER IV.

OF TRUTH OF CLOUDS: THIRDLY, OF THE REGION OF THE RAIN-CLOUD.