Ok^ '' andscaPe Philip Gilbert Hamerton The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924032185989 LANDSCAPE LANDSCAPE BY Philip Gilbert Hamerton AUTHOR OF ' ETCHING AND ETCHERS/ ' THE GRAPHIC AJLTS/ ^C. (ShC. &=€. With Original Etchings and many Illustrations from Pictures and Drawings * Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures While the landscape round it measures j Russet lawns, and fallows gray. Where the nibbling flocks do stray ; Mountains, on whose barren breast The labouring clouds do often rest j Meadows trim, with daisies pled, Shallow brooks and rivers wide ; Towers, and battlements It sees Bosomed high in tufted trees, Where perhaps some beauty lies The cynosure of neighbouring eyes.' MiJLTON [U Allegro). LONDON SEELEY &■ CO. 46, 47 & 48 ESSEX STREET, STRAND (LATE OF 54 FLEET STREET) 1885 l3JJ^^-&-^ /?-2 3i'7^- CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. — A Definition attempted .... . i II. — Illusions -5 III. — Our Feelings of Affection for Nature . . . . . . .12 IV. — The Effects of our Physical Condition on the Love of Nature . . 20 V. — The Power of Nature over us .26 VI. — Landscape as a Reflection of the Moods of Man ... 32 VII. — The Art of Describing Landscape . . 37 VIII. — Land and Sea in the Odyssey . . . . 52 IX. — The Virgilian Landscapes ... 58 X. — ^The Landscapes of Ariosto . 63 XI. — Wordsworth 70 XII. — Lamartine 78 XIII. — Landscape and the Graphic Arts . . 85 XIV. — The Scenery of Great Britain . . loi XV. — The Scenery of France ... .106 XVI. — The Geography OF Beauty AND Art . . . -113 XVII. — Mountains — For and Against . . . 130 XVIII. — Geology and Landscape . . . . , . . 136 XIX. — Of High Places .... ... 152 XX. — Moods of a Mountain . . . .170 XXI. — On Scale in Lake Scenery ... .191 XXII. — Lake Shores .... 198 xxiii. — Lake Islands .... 204 XXIV. — Lake Surfaces .210 VI CONTENTS. CHAPTER XXV. — Lake Scenery in Painting XXVI. — Rivulets xxvii. — Brooks xxviii. — Canoe Rivers XXIX. — Navigable Rivers XXX. — Man's Work on Rivers XXXI. — Rivers in Art XXXII. — Trees in Nature XXXIII. — Trees under the Control of Man XXXIV. — Trees in Art XXXV.— The Effects of Agriculture on Landscape XXXVI. — Figures and Animals in Landscape . XXXVII. — Architecture in Landscape xxxviii. — The Two Immensities . PAGE 223 229 234 241 253 271 28s 296 312 317 332 337 344 355 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE The Farmyard. By Samuel Palmer xvi Bulls in the Roman Campagna. By Camille Paris. Etched by A. Masse . . 4 The Beached Margent OF THE Sea. By H. Moore 18 Vista SEEN BETWEEN Columns. Frofii a Drawing by Claude . . . .22 Chiselhurst Common. Original Etching by E. P. Brandard 24 Near the Coast, Cayeux-sur-Mer. Original Etching by Edmond Yon . . 36 The Wave. By Gustave Courbet 56 The Woodcutters. By Charles Dameron 62 A Spate in the Highlands. By Peter Graham, R.A 68 Lucerne. By J. M. W. Turner, R.A 76 Wood and Lake. By Camille Corot 86 Heidelberg Castle. By R. Kent Thomas 96 Landscape, with Hill and Cloud. By T. Girtin. Engraved in Mezzotint by S. W. Reynolds 102 Totnes. By J. M. W. Turner, R.A. Etched by A. Brunet-Debaines . . .104 Mantes LA Jolie. By Camille Corot .110 Windsor. Original Etching by Alfred Dawson 114 Virgin AND Child, WITH Landscape. By Titian .118 The Windmill. By John Linnell 124 Thun. By Alfred Hunt. Engraved in Line by E. P. Brandard . . . .130 The Eagle's Nest. By Sir E. Landseer, R.A. Etched by C. O. Murray . .162 La Mer de Glace. By J. M. W. Turner, R.A 164 The Silver Strand of Loch Katrine. By Horatio M'Culloch, R.S.A. . . 198 Rhaiadr CwM, NEAR Festiniog. By David Cox 230 On the Thames. Original Etching by Stephen Parrish 256 KiRKSTALL Abbey. By J. M. W. Turner, R.A 274 VIU LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The Old Devil's Bridge. By J. M. W. Turner, R.A. . Le Bas Meudon. Original Etching by Maxims Lalanne . St. Denis. By J. M. W. Turner, R.A The Banks OF THE Seine. By C. F. Daubigny Rouen from the Country. Original Etching by Maxime Lalanne The Seine, near the Bois de Boulogne. By H. Harpignies. Etched by Birch Trees. Orighial Etching by F. Slocombe . Woodland Landscape. By Meindert Hobbema Landscape, with Cattle. By Cornelis Huysmans . Evening Prayer in the Sah.ira. By Gustave Guillaumet Figure and Leaves. Decorative Design by Albert D'urer Stag and Tree. Original Etching by Heywood Hardy Culzean Castle. By George Reid, R.S.A. . La Vierge au Donateur. By Van Eyck ...... PoNT-y-CvssYLTTE. By David Cox. Etched by F. Slocombe Venice from the Sea. Original Etching by Joseph Pennell Lobster Fishers. Original Etching by Colin Hunter, A. R.A. Fishing Boats. By J. M. W. Turner, R.A. Engraved in Line by E. P. PAGE 278 288 290 292 296 G. Greux 298 302 314 326 338 340 342 346 352 3S4 356 360 Brandard 372 EXPLANATORY PEN-SKETCHES PAGE THE HEAD OF LOCH AWE. By the Author .... 88 PENDLE HILL AND MOUNT BEUVRAY. By the Author ... .... 158 topography and exaggerated art. By the Author, T. Allom, and J. M. W. Turner, R.A. 174 CLOUDS ON BEN CRUACHAN AND BEN ANEA. By the Author . . . . 186 SKETCHES ON THE ARROUX. By the Author .... . . 240 sketches at chalon and autun. By the Author .... ... 284 castle urquhart AND INVERLOCHV CASTLE. By George Reid, R.S.A. ... 348 PREFACE. I T may be well to say a few words in this place about the intention of the present work. It is not intended to be a treatise on landscape- - painting, either from the technical or the aesthetic side, nor is it by any \ \ \X means exclusively a treatise on landscape in nature. My dominant idea has been the influence of natural landscape upon man, and I may without much presumption suppose myself to be in some degree fitted to write a book on such a theme, because the influence of natural landscape upon myself has always been extremely powerful, and I have always been deeply interested in observing how it affected others. I perceive, for example, that one very intelligent and cultivated person looks upon mountain scenery with an indifference that would certainly pass into dislike if he were com- pelled to live in the midst of it, whilst another lives in a perpetual state of lively interest in a mountainous country and feels dull only in the plains. The effect of the sea upon some minds is extremely depressing ; others find it to be a tonic and a stimulant. I remember a story of a woman who worked in a cotton factory in one of the great manufacturing towns of Lancashire, and who went in an excursion to the coast. When she first saw the expanse of the Irish Sea, which looks as unlimited as the ocean, she exclaimed, ' At last here is something that there is enough of!' She had suffered from restriction, confinement, insufficiency, all her days, but there, at last, she could feel the greatness of nature. It may have been in her constitution, as in that of the painter Fromentin, to delight in boundlessness. His passion was for the African desert. Others have a dislike for large spaces, and shelter themselves against what seems to them the oppressive greatness of the world in little protected nooks. You see both tendencies unconsciously revealed in the selection of sites for houses. One builder sets his dwelling upon a hill and says that he likes the view, another builds down in the bottom of some hollow and says 6 PREFACE. that he likes a shelter from the wind. In reality the reasons lie far deeper than any mere preference for a particular landscape or love of stagnant air. Two very powerful opposites are the desire for wildness and the desire for the evidence of human labour. The first finds its satisfaction on Highland moors, amongst rocks and heather and free streams; the second in the highly cultivated fields of southern England, or, still better, in lawns and garden walks. The lover of wildness always feels confined amongst the evidences of a minutely careful civilisation ; the lover of high artificial finish feels out of place in wild landscape, and as if he were deprived of his usual comforts and conveniences. Another contrast, which is evidently connected with feelings that lie in the depths of human nature, is that between the love of changeful and often stormy weather, with strong transient effects of the most varied character, and the love of placid sunshine, bright from day to day, with an assured yet monotonous brightness. These slight indications may help the reader to enter into the leading idea of the book. In writing it I have been guided by two principal considerations. Well knowing that the impressions we receive from land- scape are always the result of our own idiosyncrasy as much as of the external nature that affects it, I felt bound to let personal preferences be frequently though not obtrusively visible. On the other hand, as I had to do with the influence of landscape on minds of the most various orders, it was necessary that I should enter into feelings very different from my own, at least enough to understand them ; and, therefore, my book could not be simply an expression of personal thoughts and affections, as, for example, was the Painters Camp, which owed its success to the per- sonal element exclusively. I have noticed in some reviewers, both in England and America, but principally in the United States, a tendency to compare my writings with those of a much more celebrated author who preceded me in the same field. This is sometimes done with an intention friendly to myself, and sometimes as a means of depreciating what I have written. It is not difficult to foresee that the present volume is likely to recall Modern Painters by its subject, so that it may be well that I should explain, in a few words, what has been the influence of Mr. Ruskin on my work. So PREFACE. xi far as the study of nature is concerned it has always been, and still is, a powerful and a delightful influence. Mr. Ruskin has always united, in his study of nature, affectionate insight with intimate knowledge to a degree hardly ever found except among painters, — and in them, although the affection may be as great, the knowledge is not exactly of the same kind. With regard to art, I find myself more frequently in sympathy with artists than with Mr. Ruskin, especially on technical matters, which I have treated elsewhere and need not enter into here. I need only say that if he had influenced me I should have excluded all etchings from this volume and all engravings in which light-and-shade is attempted. Mr. Ruskin's per- ception of the beauty of nature is so delicate, and his love of nature so strong, that he is often offended by what appears to him coarseness in human work, when artists only see in it a convenient and accepted means of expression.* \ It is one of the advantages of expensive editions that they allow a book to be illustrated in a manner that is not possible in cheaper ones. In the present volume I have taken full advantage of this in giving the reader as varied a set of illustrations as the publishers and myself could get together, our leading object having always been to illustrate the whole subject as equally as we could, though in very different ways. By the permission of Mr. Agnew a magnificent Turner- in his private gallery has been engraved, for the first time, in line by Mr. Brandard ; and as Mr. Agnew most kindly gave every facility for the execution of the plate, it is probably as near to the original as any engraving on such a reduced scale can be. My friend Professor Oliver, of Kew, who has a fine collec- tion of drawings by Mr. Alfred Hunt, willingly lent one of the finest, the view of Thun, to be interpreted by the same engraver ; and I think this, plate is as good an example of delicacy and repose as the other of unrest, M. Brunet-Debaines has engraved in mezzotint Turner's ' St. Denis,' a drawing that originally appeared in the Rivers of France, where it was * The existence oi Modern Painters has sometimes caused me to treat a subject very briefly. For example, I have not said much about the landscape descriptions in Scott because Mr. Ruskin had said nearly all that was necessary on the subject, and said it well. I have simply added, in this instance, the remark, that since Scott's time a new development of description has taken place in consequence of a recent culture derived from the art of painting. I have not thought it necessary, for the same reason, to go much into the subject of mediaeval landscape, having done little more than show how the landscape of Ariosto is derived from it. Xll PREFACE. to a certain extent altered for the engraver. Another mezzotint plate is a landscape with hill and cloud by Girtin, engraved by S. W. Reynolds, and which has remained hitherto unpublished. I need do no more with reference to the etchings than allude to the contributions of men so well known as Lalanne and Brunet-Debaines amongst Frenchmen or Slocombe and Heywood Hardy amongst our own countrymen. Mr. Colin Hunter is best known as a painter, but he sometimes sketches on copper, as other distinguished painters have done in former ages ; and he kindly consented to execute one of his sketches for this volume. The careful interpretation by Mr. Murray of a small picture by Landseer is an etching of quite a different character ; but I am not sorry to give examples that prove the various capabilities of an art that I have sometimes defended. I have also been able to give examples of different nationalities in etching, including two plates by Mr. Pennell and Mr. Parrish, who efficiently represent the American school and have done me the favour to contribute. Although this is not a technical treatise, the reader must allow me a degree of liberty in this preface for a most necessary explanation on a technical matter, the employment of what are known as the photographic processes of engraving. The ideas generally prevalent on this subject are erroneous, because a false idea when it is extremely simple gains currency much more easily than a" true idea which is rather complicated. The simple false idea in this case is, that what are called in a general way ' process engravings ' are mechanical works done by the application of some scientific process ; and when such works are published along with burin engravings, as in the Graphic Arts and the present volume, a confusion is established which causes many people to call the burin engravings ' process prints' also. Besides these ideas there is another, that 'a process print,' as people call it, is in some mysterious way always to be considered an inferior thing, however beautiful it may look. I will consider these errors separately. First, with regard to the notion that a heliogravure, for example, is a mechanical affair done by a photographic apparatus, let me mention, as a case in point, the reproduction of pen-drawings by Mr. George Reid, the Scottish Academician. Mr. Reid, it is hardly necessary to say, is a very delicate draughtsman, who unites in a very rare degree the love of truth and a fine taste in the presentation of a subject. He is not PREFACE. xiu an etcher, and consequently his drawings would be known only to a few if they could not be reproduced by some sufficiently faithful process. 1 hanks to modern discoveries they can be reproduced in two ways, one to print as etchings are printed, the other to print in the text like wood- cuts. Let me briefly explain exactly what photography does in the first mstance. It simply serves to transfer the drawing to a sensitised gelatine film on a copper-plate. M. Amand Durand then washes out the gelatine from the lines, and bites the plate exactly as an etcher does. In case of necessity he retouches the lines with the burin or point, being himself an accomplished engraver. To describe one of these etchings as a ' photo- graph ' is to convey a false impression to the uninitiated. It is an etching drawn by Mr. Reid, traced by photography, and etched by Amand Durand. It is not even reduced by photography, as the etching is the exact size of the original. Nor has Amand Durand anything to do with the photographic part of the work, which is done for him by an ordinary photographer ; he is purely an etcher and engraver. The truest statement of the case is that the so-called 'heliogravure' is an etching, and just as much an etching as an original copper by Rembrandt, the only difference being that it is drawn by one artist and bitten by another. Photography only serves as a convenient intermediary between the two artists by giving a tracing of peculiarly accurate kind. In cases of this kind the original drawing may be made to look like a free-pen drawing, as were the sketches of Venice, by Mr. Pennell, in the Portfolio ; or it may be made in the style of an etching, like Mr. Henry Moore's drawing, ' The Beached Margent of the Sea.' As the repro- duction is really an etching it then looks exactly as if the artist had himself bitten it in the copper. In the case of the plate just mentioned photo- graphy has nothing to do either with the drawing, which is Mr. Moore's work, or with the biting, which is Dujardin's work, as etcher and chemist. Now, suppose we inquire a little into the history of such a plate as that by Dujardin from Samuel Palmer. Some careless critic may describe it as a photograph. I wish he could see the photograph that is lying on my table. There is, to begin with, hardly a trace of the sky, except two very faint streaks of cloud near the building. In the photograph some of the details are unsound and broken up, so that they want massing, others have disappeared and must be restored. Besides this the whole xiv PREFACE. tonic scheme of the drawing is upset, because the values of the yellows and blues are reversed. Thanks to the care and skill of Mr. A. H. Palmer, the photograph has been so worked upon from the original drawing that M. Dujardin's plate (which is an aquatint more or less aided by photo- graphy) is incomparably nearer to the original than the first negative.* Mr. Dawson's heliogravure of the Windmill, by Linnell, is by no means a mechanical reproduction, it has cost much labour of a purely artistic kind, and gives evidence, I think, of much artistic feeling. The helio- gravure from Macculloch's picture of 'The Silver Strand, Loch Katrine,' was carefully worked upon by Mr. C. O. Murray, and owes much to his patience and skill. In the photogravure of the landscape, by Huysmans de Malines, the cracks of the original picture have left some trace; but it was not thought necessary to exclude a beautiful work on that account from the book any more than one would exclude a cracked picture from a gallery. I ought not to pass the subject of photogravure without mentioning the illustration after Mr. Peter Graham's well-known picture, ' The Spate in the Highlands.' I always had an especial admiration for that picture, due to an intimate acquaintance with what Nature does in that way ; and it is a great satisfaction to me that, by the kind consent of the present owner, Mr. Cunliffe Brooks, of Barlow Hall, I am able to give a reproduction, though without the truthful colour of the original, and on a scale which must inevitably enfeeble the impression. I have only to add, in order to do complete justice to these processes, that a photographic engraving, intelligently dealt with, sometimes comes nearer than any other kind of engraving to the qualities of the original picture. The reader is well aware that I am not likely to depreciate the merits either of line-engraving or etching, but I do not hesitate to say that no line-engraver, or etcher either, ever came so near to the qualities of Corot's manner of painting as Dujardin's heliogravures in this volume. I may especially mention ' Mantes la Jolie,' which has so much of Corot's * In the illustrations to the Eclogues of Virgil there is a plate by M. Dujardin, after a drawing by Samuel Palmer (opposite page 20), and on this plate Mr. A H. Palmer spent three weeks of careful labour in etching and engraving, after M. Dujardin had done with it. Yet still it has to be classed as a heliogravure, because it would not be strictly honest to deny to Helios his small share of the performance. PREFACE. XV quality that it is almost as if we saw the painting itself, one of the prettiest and most characteristic of Corot's works. This is an example of successful reproduction where there is little detail ; and in contrast to it I may mention the reproduction of Van Eyck's 'Vierge au Donateur,' which would not have been so completely successful without a degree of fidelity to extremely minute detail in which the assistance of photography is invaluable, and not to be replaced by any degree of manual skill. To reject the help of these processes, when they can do the thing we require better than any other methods known to us, would be worse than any common error of judgment, it would be pure stupidity. The mention of Corot's works reminds me of the thanks that I owe to Messrs. Arnold and Tripp, the English picture-dealers in Paris,* who in the year 1883 had in their possession the finest collection of Corot's works I ever met with, and kindly permitted me to study all their pictures at my ease, and to select those which I desired to have reproduced. The two Corots, the Daubigny, and the Harpignies engraved or etched for this volume, belonged to Messrs. Arnold and Tripp. The etching of birch-trees by Mr. Slocombe reproduces with some variations the design of a large plate etched by him for the Fine Art Society, and is published by their permission. My own share in the illustration of the book is, intentionally, quite subordinate. It seemed to me that a few simple pen -drawings of a topographic kind were needed to explain some points, and as pro- fessional artists avoid topographic work I undertook it myself. There is this curious difference between literature and graphic art, that whereas in literature a plain, straightforward statement of something that is true has a fair chance of receiving unprejudiced attention, a drawing is generally despised unless it is pretty, and a pretty drawing is sure to be admired, however unfaithful it may be. But when a drawing is simply explanatory what does it signify whether it is admired or not ? the purpose of it is not to provoke the customary compliment, but to make some matter plainer than it could have been without its help. Whenever a writer treats of a subject which is in its nature infinite he must expect to be told that he has omitted this thing and that. There are, of course, many omissions in this volume. The illustrations * Rue St. Georges. kvi PREFACE. do not fully represent either the phenomena of nature or the labours of the most celebrated landscape-painters, nor do they even attempt to represent them in any strictly proportionate way. Thus, we have seven Turners and only a single Claude, the Claude not being representative of his pictures, but only of his slighter drawings ; and we have not a single Ruysdael, Poussin, Salvator, or even English Constable. The same kind of criticism might be applied, with even more telling effect, to our illustration of the infinite field of nature. There is only one definite study of a special kind of tree, Mr. Slocombe's birches, and the science of geology has no special series of illustrations. I need only observe that the attempt to make a book of this limited extent at all strictly representative of art and nature would be a vain pretence at the best, and only hamper the author without attaining the proposed object. Such an object could, in fact, only be attained in an extensive and formally -divided Encyclopedia. THE FARMYARD Water-colour 'Drawing by Samuel Palmer Reproduced in Photogravure by Dujardin This drawing illustrates various matters treated in different parts of the volume. It is an interesting example of the picturesque in English farm-buildings., especially characteristic of the south of England. It shows the artistic value of a windmill on a height (the reader may compare the LinnelT) and the importance of figures and cattle in the foreground of a subject connected with human industry. The reader will observe how much the whole subject gains in dignity from the great mass of cumulus cloud and from the generally grand arrangement of the sky. LANDSCAPE CHAPTER I. A Definition attempted. IT might readily be imagined that landscape was a word of mongrel derivation, the first half obviously the English land, the second half perhaps a corrupted form of scope, from a-KO'nr\ or o-kotttjctis and a-KeiTTOfiai, like the second half of telescope and microscope. In fact, however, it appears that both parts of the word landscape are of northern origin, and are to be found in the Anglo-Saxon landscipe, of which the old English form landskip has preserved the vowel. It appears, too, that scipe or skip is the same as ship in friendship, and means the state or condition of being, like the German termination sckaft in landschaft and a multitude of other words. So it happens that 'landskip' with its letter i recalls the Anglo-Saxon form, whilst our present ' landscape ' with its letter a approaches more nearly to the German and Swedish, neither of them having anything to do with scope or view. Possibly, however, some learned etymologist may trace an ultimate connexion between the Swedish skap and the Greek o-kotttj, but I do not pretend to go so far back. It is enough for our present purpose to know that landscape is a good, sound, northern word in both its parts, and that our forefathers, who used the now obsolete form ' landskip,' were not guilty of any fault of spelling, but kept more closely than we do to the ancient scipe. ' Landskip ' has been revived by Tennyson both in verse and prose. In the present volume the prevalent form, landscape, will be adhered to, both because we moderns are more accustomed to it and because it finishes less abruptly. We use the word in two distinct senses, a general and a particular. In the general sense, the word landscape without the article means the visible material world, all that can be seen on the surface of the earth 2 LANDSCAPE. by a man who is himself upon the surface ; and in the special sense, a landscape means a piece of the earth's surface that can be seen at once, and it is always understood that this piece will have a certain artistic unity or suggestion of unity in itself. Although the word refers to the natural land, it does not exclude any human works that are upon the land. A landscape-painter is not confined to the works of Nature. If he paints a river, he may also represent the bridges that span it and the castles or cities that are erected on its banks. In its general sense, landscape is also understood to include lakes, and even the sea, because land and water are often visible at the same time. Strictly speaking, a view of the open sea, far out of sight of any shore, can hardly be called a landscape — it is a waterscape ; but for the sake of convenience the generic term landscape is supposed to include everything that is seen upon the surface of the globe. Views from the summits of lofty mountains or from a balloon may come under the term landscape ; but they are hardly landscapes, they are panoramas. Even in the flattest country, or in the midst of the ocean, we may see mountain scenery of the greatest magnificence when there is a full moon ; but as the lunar mountains and valleys are only visible to us from above (if there are such relations as above and below between planet and planet), we are, as it were, up in a balloon at a tremendous height, whence we look down into the lunar valleys, and we see them in such a way that not one of the great circuses — -Tycho, Tacitus, Abulfeda — constitutes, for us, a landscape. Whenever an at- tempt has been made to represent the landscapes of the moon, the draughtsman has supposed himself there with his stool, and drawing the clear sharp details of the cloudless mountains in the unbreathable ether. A landscape always supposes the personal presence of a human observer. When Milton's Raphael wings his flight between the 'angelic quires' and out through the open gate of Heaven, he first sees Earth as a distant star, then her lands appear 'As when by night the glass Of GaHleo, less assured, observes Imagined lands and regions in the moon.' This is not landscape yet, but astronomy. The next comparison brings us nearer to landscape : — ' Or pilot, from amidst the Cyclades, Delos or Samos first appearing, kens A cloudy spot.' A DEFINITION ATTEMPTED. 3 Gradually the flying angel comes ' within soar Of towering eagles.' After that we have the real terrestrial landscape, when ' on the Eastern cliff of Paradise He lights ; * * * « # and now is come Into the blissful field, through groves of myrrh, And flowering odours, cassia, nard, and balm ; A wilderness of sweets.' This, at last, is the landscape that we know, a place where there is a cliff, and a field, and odorous groves. Here our human spirit, after the strain of effort in following the far flight of Raphael as he 'sails between worlds and worlds,' alights with profound contentment. We are on the earth as it is known to us, the dear land we were born upon and where all our years have passed. Not that it is all a paradise, but there are paradises in it still. By the help of our modern knowledge we may imagine the ap- proach to the earth as it would appear to one of us if he were per- mitted to fly like Raphael through inter-stellar space. It would first become visible as a mere point of light, then as a remote planet appears to us ; after that it would shine and dazzle like Venus ; then we should begin to see its geography as we do that of the moon ; and at last, when we come within three terrestrial diameters, or about twenty thousand miles, we should distinguish the white icy poles, the vast blue oceans, the continents and larger islands glistening like gold in the sun- shine, and the silver-bright wandering fields of cloud. Nearer still, we should see the fresh green of Britain and Ireland, the dark greens of Norwegian and Siberian forests, the greyer and browner hues of coun- tries parched by the sun, the shining courses of the great rivers. All this would be intensely, inconceivably interesting ; it would be an un- paralleled experience in the study of physical geography, but it would not yet be landscape. On a still nearer approach we should see the earth as from a balloon, and the land would seem to hollow itself beneath us like a great round dish, but the hills would be scarcely per- ceptible. We should still say, ' It is not landscape yet.' At length, after touching the solid earth, and looking round us, and seeing trees near us, fields spread out before, and blue hills far away, we should say, ' This, at last, is landscape. It is not the world as the angels may 4 LANDSCAPE. see it from the midst of space, but as men see it who dwell in it, and cultivate it, and love it.' There is a passage in Emerson where he ingeniously observes that although fields and farms belong to this man or that, the landscape is nobody's private property. Even on those vast estates in the Highlands of Scotland where all that the eye embraces — even to the distant moun- tains — may belong to a single owner, you have never the feeling that he possesses the landscape ; and probably he has not that feeling him- self, but looks upon the landscape as something distinct from acreage, and lordship, and rent. The land appertains to its lord, but the land- scape belongs to him who, for the time being, enjoys it. As the aspect of nature is continually changing, it might even be maintained that what we call one landscape is, in fact, a succession of landscapes ; and that those which we miss out of the endless series are lost to us irrecoverably, like the dead whom we have never known. BULLS IN THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA Painted by Camille Paris Etched by A. Masse There are feiv pictures in which animals and landscape are so happily associated as here. The strength of the vigorous bulls, which would make them seem imprisoned in a green fields has ample range over the vast extent of the Campagna, and the very badness of the land (from a farmer's point of view) brings the animals nearer to a state of nature. The reader •will observe the immense importance of the black bull, whose head and horn's rise above the hills of the distance. Without the animals the land- scape would be simply dreary ; without the landscape the bulls would be mere studies of animal form. Together, they make an impressive picture of animal life in the most suitable natural surroundings. n'l, f k»\ ■1^1 .X ILLUSIONS. CHAPTER II. Illusions. THE whole subject of landscape is a world of illusions, the only thing about it that is certainly not an illusion being the effect upon the mind .of each particular human being who fancies that he sees something, and knows that he feels something, when he stands in the presence of nature. His feelings are a reality, but with regard to that which causes them it is hard to say how much is reality and how much a phantom of the mind. Colour, like sound, is a sensation caused by vibrations, the most obvious difference being that the vibrations producing colour are in the thin ether and those conveying sound in heavier and denser media, as air, or water, or aqueous vapours. Where there is no eye there is no colour, and in the absence of an ear there cannot be what we call sound. With the decline of light colour changes, hues take different relative values, and in the absence of light they altogether cease to exist. The farmer fancies that a carrot retains its carroty hues in the dark, only that he is unable to see them for want of light ; but in reality the carrot is colourless in the dark, and even in the light it has only the property of exciting in certain eyes, not in all, the chromatic sensations of red and yellow. If we go a little farther in observing what the colour - sensations really amount to, we find that they vary to infinity with different human idiosyncrasies ; whence we are driven to the inevitable conclusion that no human being has risen to any fixed standard of colour outside of himself. All that a man knows about it is, that in the presence of certain natural objects or effects he experiences certain sensations, and beyond this he cannot go. What is called the cultivation of the colour faculty appears to be simply the artificial inducement of a higher degree of nervous sus- ceptibility, by which those nerves that act in such a manner as to produce the sensation we call colour arrive at an artificial state, in which they can be set in motion by a more feeble stimulus. But the cultivation of a bundle of nerves does not prove that external nature is delicately coloured ; it only proves that the cultivated nerves are capable of acting 6 LANDSCAPE. in a certain way under a stimulus too slight to affect nerves in a natural condition. What the real nature of that stimulus is we cannot tell ; we only know that it conveys the sensation of a coloured world : but this sensation is so far from being a reliable report of some positive reality that critics and painters who have been cultivating the colour -sense assiduously ever since they were boys arrive at the most contradictory conclusions, some of them affirming that certain pictures are charming and true to nature whilst others say that the very same pictures are vinegar to the eyes and set the teeth on edge. Nothing is more common in the mutual criticisms of artists than the accusation of a natural incapacity for seeing colour. The evidence that we possess, in the Homeric poems and elsewhere, of a degree of colour-perception very inferior in delicacy to our own, points to the inevitable conclusion that we ourselves may be still very far from having attained the ultimate development of this faculty. In some future time the human race may reach such a high degree of sensitiveness that it may be aware of distinctions in sensation at present beyond our experience, and words may be invented for shades and varieties of hue that would have no meaning for us if we heard them with the fullest explanation. Our descriptions of natural colouring would be alike unintelligible to an ancient Greek and a Scottish Highlander, for both of whom, alike, anything rather dark was 'black.' It is only in modern times, in consequence of analytical habits which we have acquired from our interest in painting, that we have become able to distinguish between the nature of a hue and the intensity of light. The poverty of colour in Homer has become one of the commonplaces of criticism. In comparison with Scott, Homer is almost destitute of colour, but the evolution of the colour-sense did not by any means end with the author of Waverley. It is still progressing. Compare William Black in this respect with Sir Walter. In consequence of modern culture by means of painting (practically, or by the observation of what others do in painting and that interest in such doings which is a new characteristic of modern life) William Black has reached a power of feeling colour- sensations and describing them which is evidently a great advance on the comparatively insensitive work of his great predecessor. Not that Scott's colouring seems untrue to us, so far as it goes, but it was simple and elementary. Tennyson, again, is a much richer colourist than Wordsworth. I shall have more to say upon this subject later. For the present it is enough to note that we must be continually exposed to illusions ILLUSIONS. 7 about colour, both because we differ from our own contemporaries and because there is every reason to believe that our degree of nervous sensitiveness is not the highest to which the human race may be slowly advancing. Besides these reasons it is certain that we continually fall mto the error of attributing to inanimate objects chromatic qualities that are merely sensations in ourselves, and there is absolutely no reason for supposing that if we reached the highest development of which our optical nerves may be capable we should, even then, be able to appreciate the full range of natural colouring, if there were such a thing as natural colouring at all. Let us now examine something more positively ascertainable. If the reader will consult his own recollections of what he has seen in nature he will recognise the curious truth that very much of the im- pressiveness of natural scenery depends upon the degree in which mass appears to predominate over detail. An extremely detailed view of anything is rarely, if ever, impressive. , In perfectly clear weather a mountain does not look nearly so grand as when its parts are detached by mist and. its nearer details only partially revealed amidst broad spaces of shade. So it is with the other elements of landscape ; they lose in impressiveness as the details become more visible. But the visibility of detail depends in a great measure upon the condition of our own eyesight. A man with very clear, penetrating vision, sees thousands of details that are quite invisible to another, whence the strange but inevitable conclusion that the possession of very good eyesight may be a hindrance to those feelings of sublimity that exalt the poetic imagination. We may go farther in the direction of this thought, and ask ourselves how much of the landscape is in nature and how much in ourselves, when a conceivable increase of visual power beyond that possessed by the most penetrating human eyes would reveal millions of other details in nature. Nay, we may even try the experiment by means of artificial aids to vision, and give ourselves, with the help of an optician, the eyes of an eagle, to the total destruction of that breadth of effect which is so much valued by artists, and which really does make nature better than if we saw more of it. The degrees of darkness and light may seem to be more positive and ascertainable than the varieties of hue. They attracted attention earlier ; they can be perceived by less educated organs and by a more primitive mind. But are we quite sure that we see light and dark in the same way .'' Are we sure that what each of us perceives in nature as obscurity is really obscure in itself? May there not be an illusion ^ 8 LANDSCAPE. here due to our own organs ? A vessel is sailing near the shore in the deepening twilight, and a passenger, who has very good eyes, afiSrms that there is not light enough to see the rocks. Not light enough ? There is plenty of light still, but there is not eye enough. The captain takes his night-glass to supply this deficiency, and it is as if the day had become younger by an hour. He sees the rocks plainly, and the cottages in the little fishing-village, and reads the sign over the inn-door. The nocturnal animals see sufficiently even when it is darker still. They bear witness to the existence of light in nature when man denies it. Even amongst human beings there are the widest dififerences in the power of adaptation to low degrees of light. The prudent old mother reproves her daughter for spoiling her eyes by reading in the twilight : ' My dear,' she says, ' I am sure you cannot possibly see, and will ruin your sight by straining and trying.' The daughter answers that she sees quite well. Which of the two is right as to the legibility of the book at that hour ? Each is right for herself, but neither of them could tell us how much or how little illumination Nature had really afforded. If colour and light are doubtful it may be presumed that we are on safe ground when we come to form, but even here it may easily be shown that idiosyncrasy plays its part, and that people do not see the same forms in the same objects. If ten different landscape-painters were set to draw the same mountain from the same place they would produce ten different forms. One of them would unintentionally exaggerate its ruggedness, another its height ; one of them would be struck by a certain feature, and give it disproportionate prominence; another would scarcely notice it, and mark it only by a slight indication. An infinite variety of sentiments and preferences affect our estimate of the shapes of things. Custom has an enormous influence upon that estimate, as we ' see by fashion in dress, which makes us believe that the fashions of ten years ago were ludicrously out of shape. Even certain peculiarities of structure in the human body rise into fashion for a time and affect our estimates of the natural figure itself It is at one time the fashion to be slim, and then a thin person has a good chance of being thought elegant. At another time plumpness is in fashion, and then the same person would look, not elegant, but meagre. Are we sure that with these varying estimates of the same form we really see the same form at different times ? Do we not, rather, see different forms with the eyes of imagination ? The effect of experience upon our estimate of grandeur in the per- ILLUSIONS. 9 manent features of landscape is enough to convince us how much of that grandeur must be in our own temporary way of looking at things, and in the preparation for seeing that we have undergone. Some hill in the north of England that impressed us forcibly with the ideas of size and sublimity in boyhood, seems tame and bare in mature life when we have learned from the Alps what Nature is in her magnificence. Even the very lines of the minor hill appear to have altered in the meanwhile. They are not so steep as they used to be, they rise with less audacity, the crags are no longer the awful precipices of our youth. We may retain feelings of affection towards the scenes that were connected with our earlier years, but they are accompanied by a feeling of disenchant- ment akin to that we reluctantly acknowledge when some human mind that once seemed to us almost august in its greatness is seen to shrink to very ordinary dimensions. The mere effect of perspective is a powerful cause of illusion. Sometimes in the course of travel we have seen a romantic castle or a little mediaeval city with walls and towers perched far away in the hazy distance on its own rocky height. The temptation to go out of our settled itinerary and visit the castle or city is at times all but irre- sistible; but it is better not to yield, better to carry the beautiful and romantic vision away with us like a dream, or like a description in the pages of a poet, than to go close to it and see the far less inspiring reality. Sometimes we take a middle course, we resist the temptation and carry away the poetic impression ; but we say, ' I must visit that land again and go to that wonderful castle.' During the years that intervene it is well; we have the glamour of the vision and a hope, but in an evil day we go to the place again and have leisure to see it near, and then it becomes impossible to conjure up the mysterious distance any more. A reality has taken its place — a reality of hard stone walls and a hundred architectural defects that obtrude themselves importunately on the memory. It is with the perspective of landscape as with historical perspective. If the life of ancient Athens could be made accessible to us and visible in all its details as that of Paris is to-day, we should see the meanness and folly of small intellects where now we admire the majesty of great ones. The masterpieces of architecture in marble would not conceal from us the narrow and wretched tenements of the common people; the mobility of their political passions, the ferocity of their hatreds, the unreasonableness of their expectations, would all be as apparent to us as are the same faults in our Parisian neighbours; and the strong dis- c lo LANDSCAPE. approval with which sinless London now looks upon sinful Paris might be in part diverted to the vices practised in the City of the Violet Crown. Of all the illusions connected with landscape, there is not one so prevalent amongst sentimental persons as the transference of their own tender feelings to the natural world. The scenes that make them melan- choly are spoken of and written about in prose and poetry as if they were melancholy in themselves, whilst those that awaken cheerful feelings are described as merry, and even ' laughing :' — ' There mildly dimpling, Ocean's cheek Reflects the tints of many a peak Caught by the laughing tides that lave Those Edens of the eastern wave.' Islands and waters are compared to beauties who smile charmingly in their sleep : — ' Tis moonlight over Oman's sea. Her banks of pearl and palmy isles Bask in the night-beams beauteously. And her blue waters sleep in smiles' There is no limit to the number of these expressions in literature; not that poets and other imaginative writers really believe that inanimate nature either mourns or rejoices, — ' Not that, in sooth, o'er mortal urn Those things inanimate can mourn ;' but that men find it a heightening of human pleasure and a deepening of human sorrow to associate external nature with both, and that there really are in nature certain moods which seem to reflect the moods of the human mind, and may easily be confounded with them when there is an artistic reason for doing so. This anthropomorphism exists in great force in simple minds that have a strong affection for nature, or for their native country (when it is country and not some hideous over- populated town), and it is not always easy for more analytical minds to divest themselves of it. It is not a false sentiment in simple people, but it may be fostered till it becomes a false sentiment in the intellectual and it is better for them to be rid of it. There is no valid reason for supposing any sympathy with human sorrow or any participation in human happiness amongst the objects that compose natural landscape or .the effects of light and gloom by which they are made to appear so ILLUSIONS. n different at different times. There is, no doubt, a remarkably close analogy between the moods of changeful nature and the caprices of human passion, or between the steady brightness of a fine climate and the serenity of an equal temper joined to a clear intelligence, but there is nothing more than an analogy. There is not even any great educating power in the appearances of nature, for we do not find, on investigating the subject, that the populations of those countries where nature is most cheerful and most beautiful lead always cheerful or beautiful lives. They are often far more dull and far less capable of elevating themselves to moral and intellectual beauty than the inhabitants of less favoured lands. This contrast between man and nature has been felt by travellers in beautiful regions where ' all, save the spirit of man, is divine.' The opposite contrast, between steadiness in human character and an unreliability in climate that imperils every harvest may be seen in the northern parts of our own island. When all ilhisions are brushed away the truth still remains that for some minds the natural world of landscape has a perpetual interest and charm, either as a reflection of their own moods or as a stimulus that induces them. Though philosophy may have done its worst, and con- clusively proved that nature is destitute alike of melancholy and cheerful feelings, it is still true that for some of us an effect of light may be the suggestion of bright imaginings, and an effect of gloom the cause of a vague and tender melancholy or a gravity descending to depression. These consequences are indeed, and must ever remain, independent of the existence of sentiment in hills and clouds or of real anger in the unconscious waves of the sea. It is enough that in the presence of certain objects or effects of nature we feel certain influences on the mind. The writer of this volume is and has always been only too sensitive to these influences — too sensitive, because it is not desirable that inani- mate nature should gain an excessive influence over us ; but however great it may have been in his own case he has no remnant of a belief that inanimate nature is either kindly disposed towards him in fair weather or angry at him in foul. He has been in a storm at sea when a mast was carried away; he has seen a whirlwind strong enough to lift up stones ; and he has been within a few yards of a tree when it was riven and killed by a thunderbolt: but these natural occurrences did not appear to indicate hostility to man. The explosions of the natural world are not dynamite outrages. 12 LANDSCAPE. CHAPTER III. Our Feelings of Affection for Nature. AFTER what has been said on the subject of illusions, it may seem almost superfluous to occupy time in considering such a question as the reasonableness of our affection for nature. ' Evidently,' it may be said, ' such affectionate feelings towards that which cannot return affection must be one of those illusions to which the imaginative temperament is so frequently exposed.' When, however, we observe closely the condition of mind which is accompanied by the affection for landscape, we discover that it is com- patible with a very sceptical and illusion-destroying habit of investigation. A man may be perfectly convinced that rocks and trees have no affection for him, and still he may be affectionately attached to certain places. We give to some animals, especially to horses, a degree of affection far exceeding any that they are able to return, and there is even a pathetic interest for ourselves in being clearly aware that the lower nature knows not how thoughtfully it is cared for. With the single exception of the dog, all our pets amongst the lower animals are in this position rela- tively to ourselves. They appreciate our kindness a little, but have no conception of the extent of it. The old horse can never be aware that his master has put himself to inconvenience rather than impose upon him an effort beyond his strength. He does not know that his food costs more than he is able to earn. We do not expect any gratitude for these kindnesses, and we are capable of feeling attachment for animals even less capable of returning it than the horse. I remember feeling a sort of pathetic affection for a toad. I had found out a sort of whistling that he seemed to like and he would slowly move towards me in my garden, when he became a patient if not an intelligent auditor. He was not beautiful, yet I looked upon him with a friendly feeling as an humble fellow-creature situated physically and intellectually at some distance below the human level, but not absolutely without sympathy for what is musical in humanity. My poor, hideous little friend got crushed by accident, and I mourned for him. The garden-seat where I had sat and whistled for him was no longer quite the same for me. Others have established intimacies with mice and spiders, and we con- OUR FEELINGS OF AFFECTION FOR NATURE. 13 stantly see lovers of plants who take almost as much interest in their health and welfare as if they were children. We acquire such a fond- ness for old trees that we are hurt and offended if the landowner cuts them down. Nobody supposes that there can be any reciprocity here. There is no illusion, as there may be with regard to animals. From the tree to the ground it grows upon, the transition is not difficult, so we love anything in nature that has some distinguishing feature of its own. It would be impossible, I suppose, to love one square mile in the middle of the Atlantic better than the square mile next to it ; and it might be difficult to have any particular affection for a spot in the midst of the desert ; but the two deserts of land and water have inspired the most passionate, the most enthusiastic attachments. Here the affec- tions attach th^smselves, not to a small place, but to great, dominant characteristics such as the sublimity of boundlessness, the absence of restriction. In narrower and more confined scenery the smaller the features the better chance they have of fixing themselves permanently in our hearts. A little stream like the Duddon, a litde lake like Gras- mere or Rydal Water, wins the affections of a poet more surely than the Mississippi or Lake Superior. It is observed, in the same way, that London rarely inspires that intense sentiment of local patriotism which has been the pride of inferior cities. To understand with accuracy the nature of our affection for places we have to distinguish between that affection which is due to association with persons whom we have loved, with the recollections of childhood and youth, and that other affection for places which exists entirely by itself. The very existence of the latter may be doubted. It may be affirmed that in all cases our love of nature is closely connected with our love for human beings, and that we never really attach ourselves to scenes that do not remind us of people who have been dear to us. No one denies the immense power of such associations. They have often been employed by the poets, and never more beautifully than by Tennyson when he heard again, after a long interval, the sound of a waterfall at Cauteretz and he thought of the dead friend who had heard it with him long ago : — 'All along the valley while I walked to-day, The two-and-thirty years were a mist that rolls away; For all along the valley, down thy rocky bed. Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead ; And all along the valley, by rock and cave and tree The voice of the dead was a living voice to me.' 14 LANDSCAPE. In this case a certain affection for the waterfall would be a natural sentiment — ' Thy living voice to me was as the voice of the dead.' One might love a waterfall for less than that, but what is to be said of those cases of sudden attachment to landscapes, or objects in land' scape, that we see for the first time ? It has probably happened to the reader, as it has happened to me, to fall in love with spots that had absolutely no association with his previous existence. We travel half listlessly, wearied by the repetition of many scenes that we have not the slightest desire to revisit, when all at once we come upon some spot from which it is difficult to tear ourselves away, and the longer we remain there the greater the difficulty of leaving. My first and most durable attachment of that kind was for Loch Awe, and to this day my passion is not easily explicable. It was hardly suggested by literature, for Scott would have sent me rather to Loch Katrine, ^ordsworth to the English lakes, Byron to Geneva. It can scarcely have been sug- gested by art, for I had seen few pictures of the lake except the usual studies of Kilchurn ; and it was entirely disengaged from personal asso- ciations, as none of my friends at that time had ever lived in Argyll- shire. As for historical associations, which often give us a first inducement to interest ourselves in a place, the few legends about Highland chiefs and clansmen that are connected with Loch Awe are far inferior in authenticity and interest to the history of Craven. However it so happened that I loved Loch Awe, and do still, most unreasonably. 'Tis an unrequited affection! The peat-stained waters of that gloomy pool would drown me with the most complete indifference. I have not even the consolation of Voltaire who could be proud of his lake and say ' Mon lac est le premier!' My lake is not the first, nor is it even the most beautiful. Lucerne is incomparably grander, Leman far more spacious and cerulean, but they are nothing to me in comparison with the waters that surround Fraoch Elan, and Ardhonnel, and Inishail! The affection for landscape may be confounded with the patriotic sentiment that afflicts us with nostalgia when we are away from our own home. That sentiment includes, no doubt, strong feelings of attachment to local features of landscape, but it is distinct from the true landscape passion which, as we have just seen, may be independent of personal associations. The two may be independent, or they may exist together, and the double power of them may be brought to bear upon a single scene.' Scott had a very strong affection for landscape, especially when associated OUR FEELINGS OF AFFECTION FOR NATURE. 15 with romantic histories and ruins ; and we have it on his own evidence that he had this sentiment in connexion with places outside the range of his local affections. ' The romantic feelings,' he said, ' which I have described as predominating in my mind gradually rested upon and associated them- selves with the grand features of the landscape around me ; and the historical incidents or traditional legends connected with many of them gave to my admiration a sort of intense impression of reverence, which at times made my heart feel too big for its bosom. From this time the love of natural beauty, more especially when combined with ancient ruins, or remains of our fathers' piety or splendour, became with me an insatiable passion, which I would willingly have gratified by travelling over half the globe.' In these last words we have clear evidence that Scott's passion for romantic landscape was not confined to his own country ; but he had, in addition to it, a powerful local passion also ; and when the two were focussed together on one object, their combined intensity produced a fire of enthusiasm whereof cooler and more indifferent natures cannot have any adequate conception. The country around Abbotsford usually disappoints the ordinary tourist, who rather wonders that Scott should have selected it. The tourist does not think much of the Tweed, nor of the Eildon Hills, but Scott loved them doubly, both as landscape with romantic associations, and as the scenery around his home. Who does not re- member that pathetic return from Italy when Scott came home to die, and especially that awakening from a state of apparent insensibility in his carriage ? ' As we descended the vale of Gala he began to gaze about him, and by degrees it was obvious that he was recognising the features of that familiar landscape. Presently he murmured a name or two — Gala Water, surely, Buckholm, Torwoodlee. As we rounded the hill, and the outline of the Eildons burst on him, he became greatly excited ; and when, turning himself on the couch, his eye caught at length his own towers, at the distance of a mile, he sprang up with a cry of delight.' Nor was his affection for places that of the eye only. Sounds were sweet to his ear if connected with what he loved in nature ; and the sweetest of them all was ' the gentle ripple of the Tweed over its pebbles,' distinctly audible through the open window of that chamber at Abbotsford on the sunny day of September when Sir Walter breathed his last. Endless quotations might be collected from the poets in evidence of their affection for streams and hills, and for particular valleys, often of small account in the physical geography of the world. Men of colder nature may believe that these poetical professions are not more than half sincere — a trick of the poet's craft — but the truth seems rather to be that affection 1 6 LANDSCAPE. can scarcely allow itself public expression in prose, whilst, on the contrary, it is quite free to utter itself with the most passionate force in poetry, so that a poet may describe his feelings adequately, when a prose- writer would either avoid alluding to them, or else pass them over with slight and inadequate mention. In prose we have something of the reserve about matters of feeling that regulates the expression of them in conversation, or if we express our feelings in all their strength we are compelled to do so through fictitious characters. There is a certain modesty that prevents a prose- writer from laying his heart open to the public gaze. In poetry the case is different. There the use of metre and the assumption of poetic style are held to be in themselves a sufficient disguise, so that the private man utters his feelings behind that mask with a frankness that would be impossible without it. It is only necessary to mention Childe Harold and In Memoriam as conspicuous examples of this absence of reticence in verse. I should say, then, that instead of being clever actors, who assume feelings for the occasion, the poets who have expressed a great love for nature were men who spoke truly and from the heart, by the privilege of their order, what others have often felt but dared not venture to express ; and the proof that this must be the true view of the case is that this poetic affectionateness finds an echo amongst a multitude of readers. The per- manent popularity of the familiar ode of Horace, Ad Fontem Bandusiae, is due to the affection for a natural scene which is expressed in it, and which has excited such tender sympathy in later times with reference to other fountains and rivulets that the proud, affectionate prophecy was not made in vain : — ' Fies nobilium tu quoque fontium, Me dicente cavis impositam ilicem Saxis ; unde loquaces Lymphae desiliunt tuae.' In our own times the poet who for the finish of his workmanship may best be compared with Horace (whilst he excels him in imaginative power) has said his farewell to a 'cold rivulet* in verses that may be read as long as it shall flow : — 'But here will sigh thine alder tree. And here thine aspen shiver ; And here by thee will hum the bee, For ever and for ever. 'A thousand suns will stream on thee, A thousand moons will quiver; But not by thee my steps shall be. For ever and for ever.' OUR FEELINGS OF AFFECTION FOR NATURE. 17 But however truly Tennyson may have loved this nameless rivulet, or Burns the Nith and the Doon, or Wordsworth the Duddon, there can be no afifection amongst the poets so heroic in its constancy as that of a hard-working landscape-painter. The poets feel, no doubt, deeply and sincerely, but their passion expresses itself with little effort — a few laconic verses here and there in Virgil, an ode or two of Horace, an occasional stanza by Burns. The landscape-painter works for months and years to express the strength and intensity of his affection, and often forgets that Nature cares less for him than he for her, gathering seeds of death in long sittings by river and mere. There was a French landscape-painter in our time, Chintreuil, who was not a great artist (as his gifts were not of a very high order, though his admirers have made a place for him), but in simple affection for nature he has had few equals. There is a little river called the Bievre that flows towards Paris, and Chintreuil loved it so that he would go and sit by it at dawn, when the grass was wet with dew, and stay there till the late twilight, insufficiently clad, and unconscious of his danger, passing through a hundred changes of temperature. At length he was taken ill with pleurisy, and never had any real health afterwards. Hundreds of obscure workers run the same risk every year, loving their nooks and corners of the great globe, and leaving comfort to bake themselves in the noonday sun, or be chilled by the evening dew. Their toils increase their affection. The more they work on a spot the more beauty they perceive in it, and every little place that they have painted becomes in a manner their own, like a field that some hardy emigrant has fenced off for himself in the wilder- ness. It is very difficult to give any satisfactory reason for these strong attachments to certain scenes — attachments strong enough in some cases to affect men even to tears. After trying to get to the bottom of the matter if possible, I have arrived at the following theory, which is not a complete explanation. Each of us is constituted with a special idiosyncrasy related in some mysterious way to a certain class of natural scenery ; and when we find ourselves in a scene answering to our idiosyncrasy, the mind feels itself at home there and rapidly attaches itself by affection. We may go a step farther, and ascertain how certain tendencies in the mind lead us to certain preferences. There is, for example, on one side the love of liberty and on the other the desire for shelter and pro- tection. The love of liberty would lead us to enjoy great spaces ; the desire for shelter would cause us to seek rather for enclosures, and for 18 LANDSCAPE. large natural objects that cast shadows. The lovers of liberty feel a delight in the vast horizons of the ocean and the desert. Give us a ship and we will merrily sail — ' O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea, Our thoughts as boundless and our souls as free.' There, at last, we shall have done with these walls and hedges that hem us in on every side ! It is something to be sure that we have space enough. 'We know the merry world is round. And we may sail for evermore.' To other minds the idea of unlimited space is oppressive. They would prefer something like the Happy Valley of Rasselas, separated from the vast outer world by a defence of mountains, and containing within itself all that is necessary to a peaceful and protected existence. Here, then, we have a difference of feeling at the outset that must lead to a wide difference of choice, but in the love of limited scenery there may be many varieties. The lover of sublimity would desire a valley or a plain surrounded by mountains of noble form and magnificent elevation ; the lover of tranquillity would prefer more modest hills rising without ruggedness, and covered either with green pastures or rich woods. The lover of size would like his horizon, though limited, to be vast like the lake-ward prospect from Lausanne ; but the lover of snugness would prefer a well-sheltered corner in some beautiful Derby- shire valley. There are people without any strong passion for the sublime, who have a natural preference for confined and unexciting scenery on a small scale; and there are others who are so constituted that the melancholy, bleak, and inhospitable aspects of wild scenery seem to answer to some need in their own minds. These general tastes and tendencies must in a great measure determine at least the direction in which we go to seek the landscape of our ideal affection. The differences of taste are endless. How often are we surprised by them when some rich man has the most perfect liberty of choice, and goes to spend months of every year in a place that seems to us unattractive ! This surprise is continually excited by the way in which landscape- painters fall in love with strange little out-of-the-way places that nobody but painters would examine. In that kind of travel— the only rational kind — which permits the wanderer to pause and look about him, we come upon certain places that belong to us by a mysterious natural kinship. It is almost as if THE BEACHED MARGENT OF THE SEA Drawn by Henry Moore Reproduced In Photogravure by J^uj^rdin The plate is particularly interesting to me in two ways. First, as to the drawings I was curious to know how far, with mere pen-lines, the artist would be able to suggest the gleaming and rather mysterious effect on cloud, water, and sea-beach, that had been the real subject of his picture ; and then, as the purpose of the reproduction was to approach the quality of an original etching, the possibility of attaining that quality was a matter of great technical interest to me. The result is satisfactory in both respects. Mr. Afoore's drawing completely suggests to the mind the effect he was thinking of {though the method of work may seem light and loose in com- parison with much less intelligent handling), and the photogravure is so like an original needle-etching that it would unquestionably pass for one if the process were not explained. OUR FEELINGS OF AFFECTION FOR NATURE. 19 one could be cousin to a place. After the first introduction the intimacy is soon formed, and the spot will be remembered for ever. Now, how- ever deeply and inextricably we may be plunged in illusions, however we may be surrounded by them on every side, I hold that there can be no illusion about the affinities that we feel. If we are conscious of a certain suitableness, whether in persons or places, the suitableness must be a real relation whether we are able to account for it or not; and if there is incompatibility, and our natural instincts warn us of its existence, it is assuredly useless to strive against it, however unreason- able it may seem. I hold it to be one of the greatest elements in happiness to live, as Wordsworth did, in the midst of scenes that are exactly adapted to our needs ; or at least, if that cannot be, to live within a traversable distance from them. Amongst the minor misfortunes for which nobody is much pitied, and which are far heavier than they seem to others, may be included that common one of being compelled to remain (gene- rally for reasons of poverty or occupation) in a country that we naturally dislike. The influence of landscape upon happiness is far greater than is generally believed. There is a nostalgia which is not exactly a longing for one's birthplace, but a weary dissatisfaction with the nature that lies around us, and a hopeless desire for the nature that we were born to enjoy. 20 LANDSCAPE. CHAPTER IV. The Effects of Our Physical Condition on the Love of Nature. AN association of ideas, over which we have Httle control, establishes itself between our own physical condition and the external world, affecting an appreciation of natural sublimity and beauty, whilst it mingles, more or less unconsciously, with all our recollections of nature. I have a friend who has the instincts of a traveller in an extraordinary degree, and he tells me that the ideal state for him would be that of a pure intelligence disengaged from physical conditions like a ghost, and able to transport itself at will to any sublime or beautiful scene in nature. Such a being would not have to think about luncheon and dinner ; he would not have to make compromises with human weakness ; but might visit with equal independence both ' Greenland's icy mountains ' and ' India's coral strand.' The idea is tempting, and my friend has the satisfaction of believing that it will be realised in a future state. His travelling instincts are so predominant, that his idea of heaven is simply the liberty to visit suns and planets as a disembodied spirit. We were looking at the stars together on a clear evening, when he affirmed positively that he would explore them all in the course of that happy eternity of cosmic travelling which was to succeed to his imprisonment on earth. To descend once more to our present condition, I should say that the natural landscape is a bundle of relations, not only to our minds, but to our bodies also. Our notion of the grandeur of a mountain is closely connected with the fatigue and difficulty of the as.ant. The awfulness of a space of desert is due to our knowledge that if travellers succumb to fatigue or thirst whilst crossing it they must meet their doom ; there is nothing for them but death on the burning sands. The sublimity of great spaces on the planet has been sensibly diminished by our increased mechanical facilities for crossing them. The Atlantic is hardly sublime to passengers in a floating hotel that crosses it in a week, but it regains all its old terror and sublimity for a shipwrecked crew in a boat. Yet the ocean itself is the same in both cases, the difference being between man helped OUR PHYSICAL CONDITION AND THE LOVE OF NATURE. 21 by the superhuman strength of steam and man left to his own re- sources. If we borrow for a moment the imagination of Rabelais, and suppose the existence of a giant a thousand feet high, it is evident that the Lake of Geneva would be to him nothing more than a beautiful swimming- bath, in most parts rather inconveniently shallow, and seldom deep enough to put him in any danger of drowning. The idea of the enormous depth of the clear water, which is to our minds one of the greatest elements of sublimity connected with the lake, would for him be simply an idea of convenience quite destitute of sublimity. There is no physical power, denied to us by nature, which we desire so much as that of flight, but the immediate effect of such a power if it were bestowed upon us would be to annihilate the sublimity of all mountains. With an eagle's power of flight we should ascend Mont Blanc in ten minutes, and as we should be in no danger of falling dowr) crevasses or over precipices such things would hardly attract our attention. If the power of flight were gained by the human race in some future time, the feelings of awe with which we still regard a lofty mountain would become almost unintelligible to our posterity. From these imaginary differences, let us now descend to those which really exist. Man is not a very strong animal, but there is an immense difference between a strong man and a weak one, so that it is not possible for the two to think about nature in the same way. Each inevitably makes, more or less, unconscious reference to his own feelings of pleasure or fatigue. The strong and hardy man thinks of wild and desolate scenery as a capital region for sport, the weak man inevitably associates with it the idea of dreaded over-exertion. The first is exhilarated, the other depressed, by the same scenery. The notion of the Highlands of Scotland entertained by strong, young Englishmen is that of a huge playground. What can be more delightful than a walk, with gun and dog, and a flask of whisky in one's pocket, over picturesque miles of moor, in the keen mountain air ? What rest is comparable to that of the strong man who has tired himself without exhaustion ? He dines heartily in his shooting-lodge at night, and then smokes and rests deliciously till bedtime. Meanwhile, perhaps, there is some weak old Highland woman who has attempted to cross the moor from one wretched tenement in a desolate glen to another wretched tenement in another desolate glen, but the distance has proved too much for her ; and whilst the strong man is talking oyer the details of his sport, she, poor soul ! has given up an effort beyond her strength, 22 LANDSCAPE. and, with a head whirling with giddiness, has lain down on the bleak moorland to die/' What a very different impression those two human beings must receive from the same stretch of Highland heath ! The two desires for character in landscape most closely associated with physical conditions are the desire for wild grandeur, associated with hardihood, or at least with energy, and the desire for softness and amenity associated either with indolence or weakness. It is curious that amongst the classical landscape-painters the two who were most famous and most often referred to in literature should have represented these two great divisions of the physical feelings with extreme distinctness. Salvator Rosa for our grandfathers represented the energetic side of the love of landscape, and Claude the peaceful side. Salvator had the tendencies of a powerful physical nature ; Claude had the tastes of a gentler and pro- bably weaker nature softened still farther by civilisation. The indolence of Horace, the sweet amenity of Virgil, made them in literature the remote ancestors of Claude. It has often suited the designs of poets and novelists to associate the physical strength and energy of barbarous men with the rude sub- limities of nature, whilst they as frequently contrive to give delicate and amiable heroines a background of pleasing landscape, often cultivated, and watered by streams that are just strong enough to supply the needs of ladies, and birds, and flowers. When the contrary association is made it is for the sake of contrast. Then the more delicate nature is brought into rude surroundings where the features of the landscape are hard, unsympathetic, and almost cruel, like the fastness of some robber-chief. In landscape-painting it has been the common custom to put the figures of athletic soldiers or brigands in rocky defiles whilst luxuriously dressed ladies and gentlemen are made to walk on softly undulating lawns under the shade of umbrageous trees. A skilful French painter of this century, Compte Calix, invented a sort of earthly paradise in which graceful idlers of both sexes lounged through the hours of sunshine in delightful gardens and groves. The same man may have known in his own person the two kinds of desire in landscape. He may have desired sublime landscape in his strength and a softer landscape when age or illness had taken his strength away. This is one of the advantages that may be derived from a varied experience in health. If we were always athletic we should imperfectly understand the merits of low hills, green fields, and restful waters. I think we never appreciate these quiet gifts of nature * This description is not imaginary. VISTA SEEN BETWEEN COLUMNS Drawing by Claude Lorrain Reproduced in Photogravure by ■^. Dawson As the reader -perceives^ this is an exceedingly slight and rapid drawing, executed with a few very simple lines and washes, in which there is not much variety or study of tone ; but it is interesting as an example of Claude's laconic sketch memoranda, and especially because it is plain from this drawing that, like Van Eyck, he appreciated the effect of a landscape distance seen between columns of severe architecture. Such an architectural surrounding forms a frame for the natural landscape, which gains by it almost as decidedly as a painting gains by framing. OUR PHYSICAL CONDITION AND THE LOVE OF NATURE. 23 until we have enjoyed them during recovery from som^ exhausting illness. At such times we do not desire tempests and Alpine peaks, but it is delicious to sit on a garden-seat and look across summer meadows. If there are to be mountains at all in such a scene, they ought to be far away, that their cold snows and pitiless precipices may be like a dream of an unreal world.* The contrast between what may be called the strong man's land- scape and the weak man's landscape has never been more marked than in the difference between the authors of Manfred and The Task. Byron, the strong man, half sailor, half soldier, a pugilist, a marksman, and the best swimmer of his time, delighted in every manifestation of strength in nature. He ' made him friends of mountains,' he rejoiced in the power of winds and waters. From early youth the love of wild scenery had implanted itself in his mind, and his boyish verses, however poor in comparison with the riper fruits of his genius, expressed in the clearest terms not only the delight in grandeur but an impatience of tameness : — ' England ! thy beauties are tame and domestic To one who has roamed o'er the mountains afar : Oh, for the crags that are wild and majestic ! The steep frowning glories of dark Loch na Garr ! ' The passion for sublime scenery that took possession of Byron in early boyhood remained with him to the last, and he always traced the origin of it to boyish rambles in the land of his maternal ancestors : — ' He who first met the Highlands' swelling blue Will love each peak that shows a kindred hue, Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face. And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace. Long have I roamed through lands which are not mine, Adbred the Alp, and loved the Apennine, Revered Parnassus, and beheld the steep Jove's Ida and Olympus crown the deep : But 'twas not all long ages' lore, nor all Their nature held me in their thrilling thrall ; The infant rapture still survived the boy, And Loch na Garr with Ida looked o'er Troy, Mixed Celtic memories with the Phrygian mount. And Highland linns with Castalie's clear fount.' * I have seen it stated lately that George Eliot was afraid of mountain scenery, and we know that she was fond of the English Midlands. Her health was not robust, and her mental work often exhausted her; she would therefore probably lack the physical power which is necessary to the full enjoyment of mountains. 24 LANDSCAPE. Not only did Byron love mountains as the expression of the energy of the earth, but he had the same sympathy with every other expression of energy in nature. I need not quote the well-known passage about the ocean at the close of Childe Harold, but in an earlier stanza there is a brief expression which includes far more of nature, and perfectly shows the effect of the natural forces on a heart vigorous enough to respond to the mighty pulses of the universe : — ' Ye Elements ! — in whose ennobling stir T feel myself exalted^ From this to the physically feeble Cowper the transition is great indeed. The very scenery that Byron disliked as ' tame and domestic ' is what Cowper describes with mildly observant affection. One does not doubt his sincerity. He spoke truly in the lines : — 'Thou know'st my praise of nature most sincere. And that my raptures are not conjured up To serve occasions of poetic pomp But genuine.' The raptures are genuine enough, no doubt, but not very exciting. The poet describes the Ouse 'slow winding through a level plain of spacious meads, with cattle sprinkled o'er.' He feels ' The grace Of hedge-row beauties numberless, square tower, Tall spire, from which the sound of cheerful bells Just undulates upon the listening ear. Groves, heaths, and smoking villages, remote.' Finally, he argues that these quiet scenes must be beautiful because they please him every day : — 'Scenes must be beautiful which, daily viewed Please daily, and whose novelty survives Long knowledge and the scrutiny of years : Praise justly due to those that I describe.' The inspiration, we perceive, has been of a nature so little exalting that it does not save the poet from falling into plain prose in the con- cluding verse. In The Garden the opening lines reveal the author's taste for a smooth and civilised tranquillity, his dislike to adventure. He compares himself to a horseman who, after wandering 'in thickets and in brakes,' feels his spirits rise when he discovers 'A greensward smooth, And winds his way with pleasure and with ease.' CHISELHURST COMMON Original Etching by E. P. Brandard Mr. Brandard' s great skill and experience as an engraver make etching comparatively easy for him so far as technical matters are con- cerned. The reader will observe the importance {not very common in etch- ings) here given to the sky. The opposition of dark trees against light sky, and light trees against dark sky, is not new, hut it is skilfully employed. The subject is pleasantly illustrative of the quiet kind of English scenery that the poet Cowper loved. r OUR PHYSICAL CONDITION AND THE LOVE OF NATURE. 25 After an allusion to the indulgence of a satiric tendency, comes the exact expression of his physical tastes, that are made typical of intellectual prudence. Observe how precisely they are the tastes of a weak man, how the same weakness that makes him appreciate the sofa leads him to gentle and sequestered scenes in nature : — ' 'Twere wiser far For me, enamoured of sequestered scenes And charmed with rural beauty, to repose. Where chance may throw me, beneath elm or vine, My languid limbs, when summer sears the plains ; Or, when rough winter rages, on the soft And sheltered Sofa, while the nitrous air Feeds a blue flame, and makes a cheerful hearth.' 26 LANDSCAPE. CHAPTER V. The Pozi^er of Nature over Us. IN one of Lacordaire's bursts of eloquence he exclaimed, 'J'ai dit adieu a l' ocSan, aux jietwes, et aux montagnes! The passage has produced a widely different effect on different hearers or readers. To some it appears a melancholy abandonment of the world, to others it may take the more culpable aspect of a wilful closing of the mind against Divine influences acting upon us through God's creation, and it is likely in all cases to shock or sadden the hearer just at first. We can imagine the adieu to nature from the lips of a dying man on the eve of the inevitable separation from every- thing terrestrial ; but it is more difficult to realise without pain the idea of a bright and vigorous intellect deliberately turning away from the perennial freshness of the natural world, and entering some gloomy prison-house from which the beauty of all things was to be excluded. Lacordaire's own idea was not that of imprisonment, but emanci- pation. After the release from the influences of material beauty, he was to be freer for the pursuit of that moral beauty which he regarded as by far the more excellent of the two. His renunciation of nature was at the same time an asceticism and an escape. We may have no personal sympathy with either of these impulses. We may feel no desire to bid adieu to sea, rivers, or mountains, and yet understand Lacordaire's sentiment without sharing it. The natural universe has a certain influence over us which may become a predominant power, and it is intelligible that some minds may find this power an interference with what seem to them higher or more important avocations. A landscape-painter is a person over whose existence the power of natural beauty is so strong that he is enslaved by it, often in opposition to manifest worldly interests. A young man who renounces a lucrative business for poverty and landscape-painting is the victim of natural beauty, and even in this pursuit there are degrees in the completeness of slavery. Those for whom Art is first and Nature only a mine of materials, are much less the slaves of Nature than those others who are fascinated by her perfection till they pass toilsome years in the simple THE POWER OF NATURE OVER US. 27 copyism of matter. Imagination half emancipates the artist, admiration without imagination enslaves him. Many readers will remember with what rebellious energy Blake made his declaration of independence. He would not be enslaved by the natural world. He did not bid adieu to it like Lacordaire ; but looked at it, and through it to something else which was the mirror of his mental existence. Blake reproached Wordsworth with almost deifying nature ; and thought he was often in his works an atheist with regard to the true God.^^ According to Blake, atheism consisted in worshipping the natural world ; ' which same natural world, properly speaking, is nothing real, but a mere illusion produced by Satan.' ' Everything,' he said, ' is atheism which assumes the reality of the natural and unspiritual world.' It may readily be supposed how cor- dially Blake would have approved the determination of Lacordaire to turn his back on the scenes of earth and his face towards a religious ideal. Even from the artistic point of view Blake hated and avoided nature. ' Natural objects,' he said, ' always did, and now do, weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me. Wordsworth must know that what he writes valuable is not to be found in nature.' The antagonism between the natural world and certain orders of minds in search of an ideal has been very completely stated by Victor de Laprade in his interesting volume on Le Sentiment de la Nature avant le Christianisme. His views are not always mine, but he has met the difficulties of the problem in his own way, and has clearly seen the antagonism that separates many good and able men from that nature which seemed to Wordsworth so desirable a friend for man. Victor de Laprade did not disapprove of the early feeling about nature which first took possession of the awakening human mind. That feeling seemed to him both poetical and pious. The astonishment of the infantine man in the presence of natural phenomena ' became upon his lips poetry and in his heart a religion.' On the contrary, in its modern development, the interest in nature has turned to a multitude of details by which he enslaves his soul : ' Petty and unnecessary branches of industry, artificial wants, little notions without philosophy, arts without an ideal, establish more and more over the human heart the dominion of all that is not man and of all that is not God ; the empire, in a word, of matter. 'The external world under all the names which it bears, that of nature. * These sayings of Blake are quoted from Crabbe Robinson's Diary, Chapters xxix, xxx, xxxi. 28 LANDSCAPE. of matter, or of flesh, is not impure and corrupting in itself, it only becomes so by its revolt against the spirit, by the ascendancy that man permits it over his own liberty. That which vitiates art, science, and even modern politics, is the triumphant revolt of the exterior and material element against the moral principle.' Elsewhere M. de Laprade stated in its full force the objection to the study of the natural world which has been felt by many of his religion : ' If nature is corrupt, if the flesh and the external world are an opportunity and a cause of sin for man, the human intelligence cannot apply itself to the study of the natural sciences without incurring serious risks. It is to be feared that nature may hide God from us instead of revealing Him. Since the Fall the veil of creation has become thicker, the universe is no longer transparent, and God no longer shows Himself therein. The Almighty Father has taken His presence farther away from us. God is in a sense withdrawn from nature. Without the soul and God nature is a corpse. Science has applied herself to work upon the universe as upon a dead body.' This is the kind of objection which is felt to the power of the natural world, and the reasons for it are still more apparent than they were at the date of M. de Laprade's book.* There can be no doubt that the power of the inanimate universe over man has prodigiously increased of late years on account of his increasing interest in it. He believes that he is becoming the master of Nature, but Nature is becoming mistress of him. He is like the driver of a railway -engine, who looks as if he were lord of the power of Steam, yet the Steam is so completely his master that he has to be constantly thinking about it and devoting his labour to its service. So it is with our love of landscape. Words- worth's intellectual liberty was in great part sacrificed to his intere.st in the English Lake district. Constable devoted his mind to the scenery about Flatford, and as the whole intellect of a superior man may spend itself in grappling with any one of the great problems that nature presents to us, there is no reason why the whole of a life should not be spent, as Etty's was, in the struggle to paint flesh-colour. These men, and others like them, may have been happy in their chosen studies, but they were absorbed by them and sacrificed to them, slaves of that external world from which Lacordaire desired to be emancipated, and which St. Bernard passed through with indifference. The sacrifice of scientific men to nature is beyond my province in this volume, but I may so far digress as to make the observation that it is even more complete than the sacrifice of artists. That which * The second edition was published in 1866. THE POWER OF NATURE OVER US. 29 saves an artist is the ideal element in his mental action which gives him some independence of the actual world. The less he has of this ideal element the more nearly he approaches to the purely scientific character, and he may even completely attain it and be a simple student, dissector, and copyist of matter. Then he becomes closely related to our physiologists, who are as much sacrificed on the altar of natural science in one way as the miserable victim of vivisection, nailed to the dissecting -table, is in another. It seems as if man, after living and moving with an apparent and illusory freedom in the world of nature, were now rapidly becoming the student and slave of matter, and aware of his own servitude to that which once allured him by false promises of mastery. All this looks discouraging, but there is something to be said in mitigation. Man has never been really free, and would not be happy if he were. He devotes himself to something outside of himself, and has not yet discovered any subject of study comparable in extent and interest to the world of nature. The farther he goes in natural studies the more the interest increases, nor is there any apparent reason to believe that it can ever, even in the remotest future, be exhausted. If Nature gains a great power over us we may be the better for having submitted our intellects to the action of that mysterious power. I need not go into the religious question farther than one point, on which we are all agreed, that there is order in the natural universe, and that this order is due to the presence of a mysterious energy that is always working throughout nature with an absolutely unfailing regularity. This has been stated by Herbert Spencer in terms from which nobody dissents : — 'Amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, that he (Man) is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.' It cannot be a superstition to regard landscape as one of the expressions of that Energy. Even when everything that can possibly be thought superstitious has been surrendered, enough remains to give landscape the eternal interest which must belong to every manifestation of the omnipresent Power. Lacordaire himself, after bidding adieu to ocean, rivers, and mountains, would have admitted that they were so much, but he would have gone on to say that they were a lower mani- festation than the lives of the saints, and that he dreaded their power as interfering with the action of a higher Power upon him. 30 LANDSCAPE. It would be a vain waste of time to enter into any controversy about experiences so personal as these. The only rational way of treating them is to admit that Lacordaire's renunciation was right for him if he felt his soul the better for it, but at the same time to remain loyal to our own intuitions. For me landscape is a perpetual interest and refreshment, and to renounce its benefits would be an unnecessary asceticism. Even if a pleasure were simply innocent that would be a sufficient reason for not rejecting it when such rejection diminished the charm of existence and involved some degree of ingratitude. Still more would it be an error to deny oneself a pleasure like this which has more than the negative recommendation of being harmless. The love of landscape includes what is grand and terrible as well as what is beautiful and alluring in nature. It is often an incomparable tonic, giving the strongest interest to energetic travel and a healthy stimulus that puts an end both to physical and mental indolence. Without it a man of easy fortune and studious habits like De Saussure might have lounged life away in his library ; with it he led an existence as favourable to bodily health as that of a chamois-hunter, with an infinitely finer mental stimulus. The extremely healthy nature of Alexander Humboldt found in the active study of landscape (in his own way and from his own point of view) an outlet for his physical and mental vigour. If you compare the lives of Wordsworth and Alfred de Musset you cannot but perceive what a close connexion there was between the superior sanity of Wordsworth and his passionate love of pedestrian excursions in the Lake District. If the love of nature Increases the health of the healthy it has often had a beneficial and even a curative effect in disease. The humble and" homely kind of landscape that Cowper was able to enjoy was a solace to him. The power that Nature exercises over landscape-painters has this further beneficial effect that it is a stimulus to work. Those landscape- painters who have delighted most in natural beauty or sublimity have usually been the hardest workers, though it has sometimes happened that the superior perfection of nature has discouraged the artist and disgusted him with his own attempts, leaving him to dream of what he felt unable to realise. It is possible that the power of natural landscape over a human mind might become dangerously excessive in this way by paralysing its action. The best safeguard against this great and serious evil is an interest in humanity and in human art as distinct from the natural universe. Wordsworth had the interest in humanity which saved THE POWER OF NATURE OVER US. 31 him from being entirely conquered by natural landscape, but his emanci- pation would have been more complete if he had understood the art of painting. In the case of Turner, notwithstanding a profound knowledge of the natural world there was such a strong art-faculty, and such a dis- position to refer to preceding art that he was never enslaved to nature. The mere fact that, having the choice of town or country, he could live in London, is in itself sufficient evidence that his mind had never been overwhelmed by nature to the point of sacrificing its human liberty and individuality. To sum up the considerations in this chapter it may be said that for most of us, and setting aside exceptional cases of devotion to other ideas like that of Lacordaire, natural landscape offers a very desirable refreshment and a pleasure favourable to health of body and mind, but that there is some risk of its power over us becoming excessive so as to take from our human activity by plunging us in helpless and endless admiration. Against this danger we have other resources, especially in the human studies (both in real life and in literature), and also in art as a distinct thing from nature. These other studies may become abso- lutely necessary to us as a contrepoids if we allow ourselves to live much within the mighty influence of the external world. 32 LANDSCAPE. CHAPTER VI. Landscape as a Re/lection of the Moods of Man. EVERY one who is acquainted with modern literature knows the common artifice of making landscape interesting by associating it with human feelings. This is distinct from the illusion that inanimate nature really has feelings or can sympathise with our own. We may be perfectly rational, perfectly free from superstition of every kind, and still associate the phenomena of nature with our own feelings by perceiving an apparent analogy. The analogy is, indeed, so apparent, that it has generally the defect of being too obvious. Everybody can perceive that calm and beautiful weather is like the serenity of a happy disposition, that gloom in land- scape resembles human melancholy, and that rain is a sort of weeping, and that the breezes sigh. The consequence of this extreme obvious- ness is, that those comparisons which were at first abundantly employed in literature have now become so trite as to be hardly admissible, unless stated with novel forms of language or a quite exceptional force ; and it is necessary for poets and prose-writers to exercise their ingenuity in discovering new analogies. The degree of interest that people take in such analogies is clearly proved by the great popularity of writers who state them cleverly. The sudden fame of Alexander Smith was due to an abundance of similes, taken principally from the sea, and exhibiting the analogy between natural phenomena and human experiences in a manner which the public of 1853 felt to be novel and attractive. Simply to say that the ocean raged in tempest would have had no novelty, but this was new : — ' His part is worst that touches this base world, Although the ocean's inmost heart be pure, Yet the salt fringe that daily licks the shore Is gross with sand.' If the shore is pure also, then the simile may be used for another purpose : — ' Thy spirit on another breaks in joy. Like the pleased sea on a white-breasted shore.' LANDSCAPE AS A REFLECTION OF THE MOODS OF MAN. 33 A young child is described as a ' Silver stream, Breaking with laughter from the lake divine, Whence all things flow.' On due occasion, however, the stream may be made to convey the idea of sorrowful loneliness — 'A week the boy Dwelt in his sorrow, like a cataract Unseen, yet sounding through its shrouding mists.' It was to the abundance of such comparisons as these, which were really novel and well done, that the Life Drama owed its astonishing popularity, a curious evidence of the tendency to feel interested in such analogies that must have prevailed amongst the public in the middle of the nineteenth century. They are to be found in almost all modern poets ; but other examples would not be so valuable as this, because in the Life Drama there was hardly any other element of vitality. Many of the critics of those days seemed to be under the impression that similes which connected landscape with the experiences of man were poetry in themselves, and almost the whole of poetry. They quoted them with enthusiastic delight, and it did not seem to occur to them that a closer study of human joys and sorrows might have supplied richer and more valuable material to a creative mind than the fanciful com- parison of them with a waterfall or a sea-beach.* If, however, it is an exercise of fanciful ingenuity to connect human feelings with inanimate nature by an active search for new and striking similes, the truth still remains that nature constantly acts upon our minds by suggestion, and that the moods of landscape do really answer with surprising exactness to our human moods, so that it is natural for us to see in it a reflection of ourselves. We ought, nevertheless, if we desire to think accurately, to be well on our guard against a very prevalent error. It so happens that English landscape, especially that of the south of England, does very fairly and * Such comparisons occur rarely and occasionally in the great works of poetry. Here is one in The Idylls of the King which is not unlike Alexander Smith's work, the difference being that in Tennyson these similes are not of so much importance relatively to the main substance of poetic invention : — ' He was mute ; So dark a forethought rolled about his brain, As on a dull day in an ocean cave The blind wave feeling round his long sea-hall In silence.' Merlin and Vivien. 34 LANDSCAPE. adequately represent the moods of our own English minds, which are as cheerful as the kind of sunshine we possess, and melancholy in the same moderate degree as our dull yet not unpleasant weather. Hence we are exposed to a great delusion. We are likely to imagine that landscape, all the world over, answers to human nature as nearly as it does in our own island ; but if we take into consideration the landscape of the whole world, we shall find in different countries such great excesses of a single characteristic that the landscape of one locality, or even of one region, is no more adequately representative of human moods and sentiments than the cry of one wild animal is representative of human music. I pass by this subject for the present only to deal with it more at length in another chapter. The way we really act with regard to the sympathetic appearances of landscape is the following. We go through the world in various moods of our own determined for us by many different causes, more by the state of our health than by any other, and so long as the moods of the natural landscape are not in harmony with our own feelings we pay very little attention to them, but when they come so near as to seem to reflect our feelings, the coincidence attracts our attention, and we exclaim, 'How gay and pleasant the scenery is!' or 'How melancholy it is ! ' as the case may be. I am not, just now, alluding to poets and painters, but to the common world. Poets and painters have very mobile feelings, and are constantly on the look-out for suggestions, so that they may often attune themselves purposely to the natural landscape as they would to variations of sentiment in music. But as for le commun des mortels, the way they do is to notice landscape expression in nature when it happens to coincide with their own feelings. If they walk out in a garden with friends after a good dinner in summer, and notice the dying light behind the purple hills, they may say it is a bit of fine colour that reminds them of Titian, but they will not be saddened by it. A lonely widow who has dined by herself, and goes out to walk on her terrace to muse, and ponder, and remember, shall see the same effect, and be so touched by it that her eyes will be filled with tears. So with the brightness and cheerfulness of nature ; there is absolutely no degree of gaiety in the appearances of the natural world that can bring joy to the sufferer from recent and acute misfortune, but if you are cheerful already there is no doubt that a beautiful sunny landscape in spring or summer will itself seem cheerful to you, and bring you increase of cheerfulness. Man brings into the natural world the light of his own soul as we take a candle into a room at night, and when LANDSCAPE AS A REFLECTION OF THE MOODS OF MAN. 35 the natural world happens to be bright and beautiful it sends back to us from every side the light that we ourselves bring with us. The best proof that nature is but accidentally a reflection of the moods of man is that human beings are able to live cheerfully, and even merrily, in the midst of dreary and gloomy landscape. It may have occurred to the reader, in the course of his travels, to pass through many places which seemed to him so depressing that he felt it would be impossible to live there without falling into low spirits, and yet on observing the inhabitants he perceived that they were as cheerful as people are in the loveliest scenery. The plain truth is, that the cheer- fulness of people depends upon the healthiness of the place they live in far more than on the pleasantness of its appearance. Certainly there are regions which have a most depressing effect on their inhabitants, but if you inquire carefully into the causes of such depression you will always find that they are either connected with positive diseases or with a lowered condition of vitality. The plain of La Bresse, in the east of France, is one of these regions. It is cheerful enough in appearance, with its plentiful sunshine and wide horizons bounded by blue mountains in the remote distance, and it is a rich country, with ample supplies of excellent provisions, but in spite of these advantages it is depressing because it is insalubrious.* At some distance to the north-west lies the hilly region called the Morvan, which is not more cheerful in appearance, as the horizons are generally limited by near hills or woods, and there is more rain, but the population is brighter and more lively because the region is extremely healthy. Those parts of the Alps where the peasantry are dull, and seem as if life were a burden to them, are always the unhealthy parts ; it is not the scenery that oppresses, but either the air is bad or there is an insufficiency of light. This leads us to the unexpected conclusion that a dismal and dreary country may be productive of sufficient cheerfulness by its salubrity quite to overcome the effects of its dismal appearance on the mind, so that its aspects will not reflect the human minds that dwell in it, whilst, on the other hand, regions of open space and sunshine, like La Bresse, or of beautiful mountain forms, like the Valais, may fail equally to reflect the human sadness which is due to invisible causes. It may happen, even, tha^ the natural landscape which has all the • The region is not quite so unhealthy as it used to be now that many of its ponds have been done away with. There were formerly between two and three thousand of them, and much malaria from marshy places. 36 LANDSCAPE. elements of melancholy in itself produces pleasurable feelings that the gayer and brighter landscape somehow fails to arouse. Dreary and desolate landscape is not saddening to every one, and there are those to whom the very melancholy of it is sweeter than brightness and gaiety. For me I love ' grey boulder and black tarn,' and shreds of rain-cloud flying on the northern wind better than that island valley of Avilion ' Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow, Nor ever wind blows loudly ; but it lies Deep meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea.' NEAR THE COAST AT CATEUX-SUR-MER Original Etching by Edmond Yon This is an example of that dreary kind of scenery which is to he found near the French coast. It is very much appreciated by some French land- scape-painters^ for the same reason that impels some of our own painters to choose wild and marshy places where there are stagnant pools with rushes.) and melancholy skies and distances., and few inhabitants except aquatic birds. The choice of such subjects is one of the many artistic reactions from over-civilisation and the abundance of gay and pretty trifles that exist near prosperous capitals. THE ART OF DESCRIBING LANDSCAPE. ij CHAPTER VII. The Art of Describing Landscape. MANY years ago the writer of this volume composed a sort of essay on a subject related to this, which he entitled, Word Painting and Colour Painting. It has been preserved in subsequent editions of Thoughts about Art, but after severe abridgment. The existence of that early essay does not appear to preclude a chapter on the same subject in the present volume, as more than twenty years have elapsed between the two, and the author's ideas upon the subject may be supposed to have gained some clearness from increase of experience during such an interval. The admirers of that uncouth and ungracious genius, Thomas Carlyle, appear to think that the art of describing landscape was extin- guished by his much-quoted sneer, ' Come, let us make a description ! ' Could not the same invitation to set to work be addressed to the maker of anything whatever ? Might not a wheelwright say to his partner, 'Come, let us make a cart-wheel!' and would the wheel be the less likely to answer its purpose for having been planned beforehand, and not produced by the fortuitous concourse of ash-wood and iron? A description that is well done is a product of human skill, and I propose to show in the present chapter, first that a good description is worth the trouble and industry that it costs, and secondly, how the labour may be most intelligently applied. The external world is always around us and always exercising some kind of influence upon us. Sometimes it is beautiful and charms us, sometimes it is terrible and oppresses us. It may weary us by its monotony, or be so varied and interesting as to compensate for the lack of other variety and excitement. Whatever the nature of it, the land- scape that surrounds us, even during the most temporary residence, even for a day when we are travelling, can never be without some degree of influence upon us whether we are conscious of that influence or not. The subject, therefore, is one of universal importance, though the importance of it varies considerably in degree. Sometimes a few words of landscape description may be enough, but those few require to be chosen carefully; at other times a page is not too much, but the page 38 LANDSCAPE. must be written with some art or else the labour which the author ouo-ht to have undertaken will be cast upon the innocent reader. It is assumed by the enemies of landscape art in literature that it is an elaborate affectation. It need not be either affected or elaborate. It may be at the same time one of the most sincere forms of literary art and one of the most simple. The sincerity of it is assured when the writer is naturally observant and sets down just what he sees; the simplicity of it is partly the result of straightforwardness and partly the achievement of skill. The almost complete absence of landscape description in some authors is a serious literary defect. It is so in some ancient historians, and particularly in Caesar. Nothing is more vexatious, in reading Caesar, than the frequent absence of assistance from the author when we desire to picture to ourselves the marches of his army and the positions occupied or abandoned by the enemy. His mind appears to have acted quite mechanically, as if it had been of itself a sort of mili- tary calculating machine full of figures representing the strength of forces and the distances that had to be traversed ; but taking small account of the wants of a reader who had not seen the country with his own eyes. I have no desire to imply that a general should describe countries with the affectionate enthusiasm of an amateur of landscape beauty, that is not his affair; but it can hardly be too much to expect that a military writer should give a clear account of important topographic facts, how- ever briefly, and Caesar only does this sometimes. The description of Vesontio, in the first Book, with the Dubis almost surrounding it is truthful ; Lake Leman is mentioned as flowing into the Rhone (Lib. I. cap. viii.), and he notices the extreme slowness of the current of the Sadne, that river Arar which ' influit incrediblli lenitate, ita ut oculis in utram partem fluit judicari non possit.' He tells us, too, that the Rhine is very wide and deep (Lib. I. cap. ii.) and that the Jura is high. The general, and to us very interesting, description of the British Islands (Lib. I. cap. xiii.) is a most acceptable bit of ancient geography, but it cannot be called landscape. There is a short description of the remarkable situation of Alesia on a lofty hill, at the foot of which two rivers flowed, whilst before it extended a plain about three miles long, and everywhere else there were other hills at a little distance from the first, and of the same height. This is a piece of sufficient military description. That of Avaricum is so far clear that the nature of the surrounding country is in some degree intelligible ; but what shall we say of the total and disappointing absence of landscape description with THE ART OF DESCRIBING LANDSCAPE. 39 regard to so important a city as Bibracte ? Caesar does not even tell us whether Bibracte stood on an isolated hill or was situated on the banks of a river, which would have settled the question for all time whether the site of Augustodunum, or the summit of Mount Beuvray, was the real position of the Aeduan capital. There are now good reasons for believing that it was a hill oppidum like Alesia, and situated on the Beuvray, a lofty hill detached from others and well supplied with water- springs near its summit round which exists a line of strong Gaulish fortification enclosing the remains of many Gaulish and Gallo- Roman dwellings.* It has, however, been uniformly taught for centuries that Bibracte was on the site of Augustodunum, also a place very strongly marked by nature, and which a word of description would have made recognisable by all posterity. It might be argued that when Caesar pur- sued the Swiss and turned aside to go to Bibracte for provisions, he was eighteen miles from the city and could not be expected to describe it, especially as the great battle occurred before he could get there. Yes, but as he afterwards wintered at Bibracte he must have known the place ; yet he thinks the mere name of it is enough. ' Ipse Bibracte hiemare constituit.' The absence of landscape description also prevents us from knowing exactly at what place he crossed the Sa6ne, and what was his itinerary from the right bank of the Sadne to the place where he fought the Swiss, Let me not be misunderstood as desiring to advocate either a picturesque or a sentimental style of landscape description in military writers. They have something else to think of than the rose of dawn or the melancholy of autumnal twilight ; they have nothing to do with the artistic or the poetical side of landscape. But although a military writer is neither painter nor poet, he ought to be a perfecdy clear topo- grapher; he ought always to let the reader know exacdy in what kind of country every battle is fought, every march undertaken, and he ought to describe the natural defences of every fortress. This is understood by modern war correspondents who always attempt, with various degrees of ability, to describe for us the scenes of military operations. Not- withstanding the literary merits of Caesar's simple style, it may safely be asserted that if the narrative of his campaigns had been written by a good newspaper man of the present day we should have known more about the aspect of the country. If we expect some information from military writers, still more is * To prevent a possible disappointment to some antiquarian tourist I ought to add that the dwellings have been carefully buried again after each annual excavation. LANDSCAPE. 40 it natural to count upon it from the larger leisure of a civilian who undertakes to narrate his wanderings. The modern traveller knows this, and cultivates his descriptive powers, the danger being rather on the side of unintelligent forcing than neglect. It will not be a waste of time to inquire what are the qualities that a traveller ought to seek for in his descriptions. He should never waste valuable space in empty expressions of impotence — never say that anything is so astonishing as to be in- describable. Everything in nature can be described if only the writer has a proper command of language. If he is determined not to shirk his duty he can make everything intelligible by comparisons, but he must avoid the two forms of untruth — falsehood by inadequacy and falsehood by exaggeration. Nay, even a certain deviation from the exact truth is permissible if the traveller allows his personal preferences to be so visible that there can be no mistake about his partiality. Dickens was not exacdy a truthful describer, but he was so candid about his own feelings that the reader could easily make the proper allowance for them. It was also a perfectly well-known characteristic of his to let his fancy play very freely on what he saw, therefore, as coming from him, a very fanciful description could hardly be called a false description, because every intelligent reader would be sure to make allowances. Dickens was so constituted that when once his fancy had begun to be lively it ran away with him like an excited horse. Here is an example of what I mean in the description of stumps of trees seen on some wild land in America : — ' These stumps of trees are a curious feature in American travelling. The varying illusions they present to the unaccustomed eye as it grows dark are quite astonishing in their number and reality. Now there is a Grecian urn erected in the centre of a lonely field ; now there is a woman weeping at a tomb ; now a very commonplace old gentleman in a white waistcoat, with a thumb thrust into each armhole of his coat ; now a student poring on a book ; now a crouching negro ; now a horse, a dog, a cannon, an armed man, a hunchback throwing off his cloak and stepping forth into the light. They were often as entertaining to me as so many glasses in a magic lantern, and never took their shapes at my bidding, but seemed to force themselves upon me whether I would or no, and, strange to say, I sometimes recognised in them counterparts of figures once familiar to me in pictures attached to childish books forgotten long ago.'* This description is fanciful in the extreme, but as the writer frankly lets his own personality be visible from beginning to end, and as the reader knows that the fancy was a faculty extremely active in Dickens, * American Notes, chap. xiv. THE ART OF DESCRIBING LANDSCAPE. 41 there is no falsehood, even though, to a landscape-painter, not one of the trees would have seemed like the ' very commonplace old gentleman in a white waistcoat, with'a thumb thrust into each armhole of his coat,' an image that rose like a Cockney ghost in the brain of the novelist of the London middle classes. The case is far otherwise when an inferior writer attempts to palm off a poor invention as the product of the higher imagination. Here is an attempt at sylvan description by Disraeli which is intended to be striking and magnificent.' The passage occurs in Coningsby : — 'The wind howled, the branches of the forest stirred, and sent forth sounds like an incantation. Soon might be distinguished the various voices of the mighty trees, as they expressed their terror or their agony. The oak roared, the beech shrieked, the elm sent forth its deep and long-drawn groan, while ever and anon, amid a momentary pause, the passion of the ash was heard in moans of thrilling anguish.' All this is mere pinchbeck. It is neither the record of observed facts, like a sound bit of honest work from nature, nor a truthful description of strange fancies that really occurred to the author in the presence of nature, as those fancies got into the head of Dickens when he was jolted in the coach in the twilight over the horrible corduroy road. The distinction established between the voices of the trees is an absurdly unreal distinction. No real student of nature would have made it. What really happens in a storm is a great confused noise caused by the friction of innumerable leaves and the whipping of twigs, with the occasional rough creaking rub of a branch against another that happens to be near enough, and perhaps (but this is rarer) the fracture of a broken .bough or the crash of a falling trunk, but even these last would not be distinctly audible in the hubbub of tempest unless they were near at hand. If the reader cares for a true account of sylvan noises I have no doubt that the following by Charles Kingsley may be relied upon. He is speaking of the ' High Woods,' in the West Indies : — ' Here, when the forest giant falls, as some tell me that they have heard him fall, on silent nights, when the cracking of the roots below and the lianes aloft rattles like musketry through the woods, till the great trunk comes down, with a boom as of a heavy gun, re-echoing on from mountain-side to mountain-side ; then, ' Nothing in him that doth fade, But doth suffer an s/r-charge Into something rich and strange.' This is good, but it is not direct observation, it is only hearsay. G 42 LANDSCAPE. Now let us see what Kingsley could tell us about something that he had seen with his own eyes. A less intelligent traveller would have attempted to convey the idea in general terrns by telling us that the trees were high and bright with various kinds of flowers. Kingsley takes the trouble to make us understand how and in what way the tropical forest is magnificent : — • ' You catch sight, it may be, of the head of a tree aloft, blazing with golden trumpet-flowers, which is a poui, and of another lower one covered with hoar-frost, perhaps a croton ; and of another, a giant covered with purple tassels : that is an angelim. Another giant overtops even him. His dark, glossy leaves toss off sheets of silver light as they flicker in the breeze, for it blows hard aloft outside while you are in stifling calm : that is a balata. And what is that on high ? Twenty or thirty square yards of rich crimson a hundred feet above the ground. The flowers may belong to the tree itself It may be a mountain mangrove, which I have never seen in flower, but take the glasses and decide. No. The flowers belong to a liane. The wonderful Prince of Wales's feather has taken possession of the head of a huge mombin, and tiled it all over with crimson combs, which crawl out to the ends of the branches, and dangle twenty or thirty feet down, waving and leaping in the breeze. And over all blazes the cloudless blue.' This seems to me an excellent example of description. It does not fail on the side of inadequacy like a lazy attempt in which the author falls short from sheer want of energy, and on the other hand it does not weary by exaggeration. There are light, colour, life, and motion, all combined, as it seems to me, in one passage of moderate length with almost perfect art. I hardly know what to point to as the most effective touch where every syllable tells, but these few words contain the elements of light, colour, life and motion in themselves ending with an excellent contrast. 'His dark, glossy leaves toss off sheets of silver light as they flicker in the breeze ; for it blows hard aloft outside while you are in stifling calm! When Kingsley visited the West Indies he was just in that con- dition of mind which is most favourable to success in description. He had long desired to see that wonderful tropical nature with his own eyes, and when he found himself amongst it the perfect freshness of his sensations, combined with strong excitement of the mind, gave great vigour to his pen. He was at a time of life, too, when a writer who has lived wisely is at his best, because he has gained mastery over language without having lost the power of enjoyment. A traveller who did not set out with the intention of word-painting, but to see how men of English race fared wherever they had settled, said that ' travellers soon learn when making estimates of a country's THE ART OF DESCRIBING LANDSCAPE. 43 value, to despise no feature of the landscape.' If Sir Charles Dilke wrote that rather from the political than the artistic point of view it is not the less accurate in any case, for the landscape, however uninteresting it may seem, or even ugly, is never without its great influence on human happiness and destiny. The interest in human affairs which Sir Charles Dilke has in common with most men of any conspicuous ability, does not prevent him from seeing landscape-nature as well as if his travels had no other object. His description of the Great Plains of Colorado is an excellent example of that valuable kind of description which is not merely an artful arrangement of sonorous words, but per- fectly conveys the character of the landscape and makes you feel as if you had been there. ' Now great roaring uplands of enormous sweep, now boundless grassy plains ; there is all the grandeur of monotony and yet continual change. Sometimes the distances are broken by blue buttes, or rugged bluffs. Over all there is a spark- ling atmosphere and never-failing breeze ; the air is bracing even when most hot ; the sky is cloudless and no rain falls. A solitude which no words can paint and the boundless prairie swell convey an idea of vastness which is the overpowering feature of the Plains The impression is not merely one of size. There is perfect beauty, wondrous fertility, in the lonely steppe ; no patriotism, no love of home, can prevent the traveller wishing here to end his days. ' To those who love the sea, there is a double charm. Not only is the roll of the prairie as grand as that of the Atlantic, but the crispness of the wind, the absence of trees, the multitude of tiny blooms upon the sod, all conspire to give a feeling of nearness to the ocean, the effect of which is that we are always expecting to hail it from the top of the next hillock. ' The colour of the landscape is in summer green and flowers ; in fall-time yellow and flowers, but flowers ever.'* If the reader will take the trouble to analyse this description he will perceive that, although powerful, it is extremely simple and sober. The traveller does not call in the aid of poetical comparisons {the only com- parison indulged in is the obvious one of the Atlantic), and the effect of the description on the mind is due to the extreme care with which the writer has put together in a short space the special and peculiar characteristics of the scenery, not forgetting to tell us everything that we, of ourselves, would naturally fail to imagine. He corrects, one after another, all our erroneous notions, and substitutes a true idea for our false ones. The describer has been thoroughly alive, he has travelled with his eyes open, so that every epithet tells. The reader feels under a real obligation; he has not been put off with mere phrases, but is enriched with a novel and interesting landscape experience. * Greater Britain, Chap. XII. 44 LANDSCAPE. In a good prose description, such as these by Kingsley and Sir Charles Dilke, the author has nothing to do but to convey, as nearly as he can, a true impression of what he has actually seen. The greatest difficulties that he has to contend against are the ignorance and the previous misconceptions of his readers. He must give information without appearing didactic, and correct what he foresees as probable false conceptions without ostentatiously pretending to know better. His lan- guage must be as concise as possible, or else important sentences will be skipped, and yet at the same time it must flow easily enough to be pleasantly readable. It is not easy to fulfil these conditions all at once, and therefore we meet with many books of travel in which attempted descriptions frequently occur which fail, nevertheless, to convey a clear idea of the country. A weak writer wastes precious space in sentimental phrases or in vague adjectives that would be equally applicable to many other places, and forgets to note what is peculiarly and especially charac- teristic of the one place that he is attempting to describe. The semi-poetical kind of description, of which prose-poetry is the vehicle, is a perilous kind of literary labour, for this reason. It is nothing without a gush of sentiment, and if the reader once begins to see reasons for suspecting that the sentiment is assumed for the occasion he very soon has enough of it. It may be that in this, as in other departments of fine art, the enthusiasm is often only acting, but it ought to seem real and spontatieous. Here the qualities of clearness and accuracy are not enough; it is necessary to touch the reader's feelings and get him into a sort of enchanted condition in which he will follow a long description from beginning to end without weariness, and especially without thinking that the most enthusiastic metaphors and similes are overdone. Mr. Ruskin is the greatest master of this difficult branch of art, and if he is not quoted in this place it is not from any want of appreciation, but because his finest descriptions are too well known for quotation to be necessary, and also because they are generally long, so that to borrow them would be a kind of annexation. Again, they would lose much of their meaning if detached from the argument that led up to them, as for example in the description of Sion, in the chapter on ' Mountain Gloom,' the neglected condition of the city is connected with an argument about the effects of mountains and Roman Catholicism upon the mind. The description itself begins in a plain way with noticing a number of minute facts, all bearing more or less directly on the mam purpose, and finally, when the reader's mind has been suffi- ciently prepared by dwelling in the details of a strange and melancholy THE ART OF DESCRIBING LANDSCAPE. 45 city he is led up to poetry in the conclusion, which I cannot help quoting, after all : — ' Beyond this plot of ground the Episcopal palace, a halfrdeserted, barrack- like building, overlooks a neglected vineyard, of which the clusters, black on the under side, snow-white on the other with lime-dust, gather round them a melan- choly hum of flies. Through the arches of its trellis-work the avenue of the great valley is seen in descending distance, enlarged with line beyond line of. tufted foliage, languid and rich, degenerating at last into leagues of grey Maremma, wild with the thorn and the willow ; on each side of it, sustaining themselves in mighty slopes and unbroken reaches of colossal promontory, the great mountains secede into supremacy through rosy depths of burning air, and the crescents of snow gleam over their dim summits, as — if there could be Rloyrnin^, as there once was War, in Heaven — a line of waning moons might be set for lamps along the sjdes of some sepulchral chamber in the infinite.' This is very daring, and perhaps no other writer of sound prose would have ventured quite so far as the sepulchral chamber in the Infinite ; but the effect is powerful in connexion with the melancholy note of the whole subject, that of Mountain Gloom, which really has to do with the spirit of the Universe. The art here consists in lifting the subject upon a sufficiently high plane of thought to make imaginative sublimity in keeping and appropriate. To understand the necessity fof this the reader has only to suppose that a traveller of ordinary type visits the same town of Sion and takes note of its backwardness in a commonplace spirit, without reference to the persistent influences of over- whelming nature on the mind. Such a traveller could never effect the transition from the details of ill-kept streets to ' a line of waning moons,' and if he made any attempt at sublimity he would fall into the bathos of the false sublime. Novelists have a great advantage over travellers and essayists in being able to connect descriptions of landscape with human feeling in persons q.uite outside of themselves. The reader probably remembers how very skilfully the ' Mountain Gloom ' of the Isle of Skye is connected, in A Daughter of Heth, with Coquette's depressed and unhappy state of mind when she discovers that she is in love with Lord Earlshope. She wants to get away, she is like a prisoner on the yacht, and the gloomy mountains (so different from the brighter and more open French scenery she had been accustomed to in childhood) deepen her melancholy more and more. ' To me these hills look dreadful,' she says. ' ,1 am afraid of them. I should be glad to be away.' It is this suffering of one poor little human heart that gives an appalling power to the scene. ' Far up amid the shoulders and peaks of Garsven there were flashes of flame 46 LANDSCAPE. and the glow of the western skies, with here and there a beam of ruddy and misty light touching the summits of the mountains in the east ; but down here, in the black and desolate lake, the bare and riven rocks showed their fantastic forms in a cold grey twilight. There was a murmur of streams in the stillness, and the hollow silence was broken from time to time by the call of wild fowl. Otherwise the desolate scene was as silent as death, and the only moving thing abroad was the red light in the clouds. The Caroline lay motionless in the dark water. As the sunset fell the mountains seemed to grow larger ; the twisted and precipitous cliffs that shot down into the sea grew more and more distant ; while a pale blue vapour gathered here and there, as if the spirits of the mountains were advancing under a veil.' In the simple prose description the essential merits are truth to nature, and the art of insisting on those points that the reader is not likely to imagine w^ithout suggestion and help. The skilful writer of travels makes us not only see the country, but feel its atmosphere around us ; and yet, to effect this, he has recourse to very simple means. With the prose-poet the case is somewhat different. He begins by observing facts as carefully as the other, but when he has made the facts quite plain to us, he leads us on from the region of positive truth to the realm of imagination, and before we are quite aware of the change a wonderful transition is effected ; we are raised from the common earth and carried into the land of dreams. The difficulty here is in delivering the mind from the real and lifting it beyond reality with the help of reality itself In professed poetry this transition has not to be made. It is expected that the poet shall have made it for himself before beginning to write, and if he has not quite succeeded in doing this, we feel that he has begun to write with an inadequate inspiration. This was the one great fault of Wordsworth — that he often wrote verse when not completely in the poetic mood. Is this poetry ? ' In one of those excursions (that I hope I shall never forget) with a young friend through North Wales, I left Bethgelert at bedtime, and went westward to see the sun rise from the top of Snowdon. We came to the door of a rude cottage at the foot of the mountain and roused the shepherd, who is a trustworthy guide for strangers, then sallied forth after some refreshment. It was a close, warm, dull night, with a dripping fog, that covered all the sky ; but without being dis- couraged we began to climb the mountain side.' Does this prose become poetry when versified as follows ? ' In one of those excursions (may they ne'er Fade from remembrance!) through the northern tracts Of Cambria ranging with a youthful friend, I left Bethgelert's huts at couching-time, And westward took my way, to see the sun THE ART OF DESCRIBING LANDSCAPE. 47 Rise, from the top of Snowdon. To the door Of a rude cottage at the mountain's base We came, and roused the shepherd who attends The adventurous stranger's steps — a trusty guide ; Then, cheered by short refreshment, sallied forth. ' It was a close, warm, breezeless, summer night. Warm, dull, and glaring, with a dripping fog. Low-hung and thick, that covered all the sky ; But, undiscouraged, we began to climb The mountain-side.' No, this is not poetry yet ; it is only prose in metre : but a very little farther in the same work (the fourteenth book of the Prelude) we come upon a description sufficiently sustained in its emotional elevation to be truly poetical : ' The moon hung naked in a firmament Of azure without cloud, and at my feet Rested a silent sea of hoary mist. A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved All over this still ocean ; and beyond. Far, far beyond, the solid vapours stretched. In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes, Into the main Atlantic, that appeared To dwindle, and give up his majesty.' From this and many other examples I should infer that Wordsworth was a prose-poet ; that is to say, one who rises from prose to poetry, and then falls back again into the heavier medium, as a flying -fish plays between water and air, whilst the complete poets sustain their flight, and scorn the ocean of the commonplace that tumbles heavily beneath them. Without imaginative conception and musical expression there is no poetry ; but good poetry requires knowledge at first-hand also, therefore the poets are very close observers. There is a most interesting passage about the study of landscape-nature in a letter by Tennyson,* from which I borrow the following account of his way of taking mental memoranda : — ' There was a period in my life when, as an artist, Turner for instance, takes rough sketches of landskip, &c., in order to work them eventually into some great picture, so I was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, what- ever might strike me as picturesque in nature. I never put these down, and many and many a line has gone away on the north wind, but some remain — e.g. " A full sea glazed with muffled moonlight." * Addressed to Mr. E. S. Dawson, of Montreal, and dated November, 1882. See The Academy, No. 629. ^3 LANDSCAPE. 'Suggestion: the sea one night at Torquay, when Torquay was the most lovely sea^illage in England, though now a smoky town. The sky was covered with thin vapour, and the moon was behind it. "A great black cloud Drag inward from the deep." ' Suggestion : a coming storm seen from the top of Snowdon. In the Idylls of '^''^"'^■- "With all "Its stormy crests that smote against the skies." ' Suggestion : A storm which came upon us in the middle of the North Sea. "As the water-lily starts and slides." ' Suggestion : Water-lilies in my own pond, seen on a gusty day with my own eyes. They did start and slide in the sudden puffs of wind till caught and stayed by the tether of their own stalks'— quite as tme as Wordsworth's simile, and more in detail. " A wild wind shook — follow, follow thou shalt win. ' ' Suggestion : I was walking in the New Forest. A wind did arise and — "Shake the songs, the whispers, and the shrieks, Of the wild wood together." ' The wind, I believe, was a west wind ; but, because I wished the Prince to go south, I turned the wind to the south, and, naturally, the wind said " follow." ' The landscapes of Tennyson are generally distinguished by their brevity and concentrated force ; the other quality of first-hand observation they have in common with the more diffuse landscape descriptions of Wordsworth. In Shelley the observation is not so close, original, or accurate ; but the poetical spirit is so strong in him that the comparative deficiency of substance is easily forgiven. His mind moves in a dream- world, vast and vague, which rarely gains any very definite clearness. Here is a vision of land and sea by starlight : — ' The mountains hang and frown Over the starry deep that gleams below, A vast and dim expanse, as o'er the waves we go.'* Islands are met with afterwards in the course of the voyage and thus described, the reader will see with how little definition : — ' Winding among the lawny islands fair Whose blosmy forests starred the shadowy deep. The wingless boat paused where an ivory stair Its fretwork in the crystal sea did steep.'f * Revolt of Islam, Canto I. 23. ] Ibid. Canto I. 51. THE ART OF DESCRIBING LANDSCAPE. 49 When the scene is transported to a mountain-lake, the lake is cer- tainly mentioned ; but we can scarcely say that it is described : — ' The rock-built barrier of the sea was past, And I was on the margin of a lake, A lonely lake, amid the forests vast And snowy mountains.'* The following magnificent lines have the peculiar quality of Shelley's landscape-work in the greatest perfection. They were probably sug- gested by the Rhone, but of course the poet keeps clear of localised geography. The choice of epithets in the first line is most artful in its expression of the power of a great current : — ' Till down that mighty stream, dark, calm, and fleet, Between a chasm of cedarn mountains riven, Chased by the thronging winds whose viewless feet. As swift as twinkling beams, had under heaven From woods and waves wild sounds and odours driven. The boat flew visibly. Three nights and days, Borne like a cloud through morn and noon and even, We sailed along the winding watery ways Of the vast stream, a long and labyrinthine maze.'f It is remarkable that as Rossetti was a painter he should not have taken a stronger interest in landscape. Such landscape bits as occur in his poems are good and sometimes admirable, but they are rare. Even ' The Stream's Secret ' does not contain much about the stream, although we have it on the authority of Mr. William Bell Scott, who was a fellow-visitor with Rossetti at Perkill Castle, in Ayrshire, that the poem was written, as it were, from nature, or at least in the presence of nature. I There is hardly any stanza in which the stream itself has such an important place as in the following where a night effect and an effect of sunshiny morning are brought close together for contrast-— see in how few words ! — * Revolt of Islam, Canto IV. 4. f Ibid. Canto XII. 33. I 'Published in 1870, it was written so late as in the autumn of 1869, and Mr. William Bell Scott has told me how he frequently used to look for Rossetti as the dinner hour drew near, and almost invariably found him lying in the little cavern a-sprawling in the long grass and bracken along the banks (of the river Penwhapple). He considered it one of his very best productions, and it certainly cost him the most labour, very probably his opinion being due to that fact as well as to its having been written " direct from nature." ' — Life of D. G. Rossetti. By William Sharp. H 50 LANDSCAPE. ' Dark as thy blinded wave When brimming midnight floods the glen, — Bright as the laughter of thy runnels when The dawn yields all the light they crave ; Even so these hours to wound and that to save Are sisters in Love's ken.' In 'Rose Mary' there are some glimpses of landscape, seen in the beryl, which show great strength of mental vision and bring the scenes before us with a word or two. We see the weir and the broken water- gate, and afterwards stand where the roads divide and the river is like a thread beneath us ; then the ' waste runs by,' and we come to the place ' where the road looks to the castle steep,' and there are seven hill-clefts, one of them filled with mist. But in all Rossetti's poems there is nothing in the way of landscape-painting comparable to the weird little marine picture in ' The King's Tragedy ' : — ' And we of his household rode with him In a close-ranked company ; But not till the sun had sunk from his throne Did we reach the Scotish Sea. ' That eve was clenched for a boding storm, 'Neath a toilsome moon half seen ; The cloud stooped low and the surf rose high ; And where there was a line of the sky Wild wings loomed dark between.' This example gives evidence of one of the many superiorities that literature has over painting.* A writer, whether of prose or verse, is not compelled to introduce the reader to any scene without preparation, and it is one of the best known and most useful literary artifices to lead the reader gradually on till he is made to expect a description, and even to desire it. In this case the reader accompanies the royal household and so comes to the sea-shore, when he naturally wants to look sea- wards (as we all do when we reach the sea-side on account of the fasci- nation exercised by so great a spectacle as that of the waste of waters), and the poet gratifies the wish he has created. In prose romances the novelist often describes unpleasant scenery till we feel the full tedium of it, and then he relieves our desire by a description of an approach to a more pleasant place that seems quite charming when, at last, we get there. * Compensated, more or less completely, by superiorities of another order that painting has over hterature. THE ART OF DESCRIBING LANDSCAPE. 51 Landscape description in literature has been treated with intense and unintelligent scorn by some critics, but it only deserves contempt when it is out of place or ill done. A narrative of real or fictitious events is never quite complete or satisfactory unless we are told something about the sort of country where they happen. We always desire to fill in, how- ever broadly, a landscape background for ourselves. The commonest vices of bad landscape description are tediousness and false sentiment. Tediousness comes from want of selection, but there is another vice connected with the art of choosing which, if not so tiresome, is certainly more provoking. A writer leads us to a place that we want to know something about ; he makes a description of it, but fails to mention something that is quite essential to our understanding of the place. A traveller will sometimes attempt to describe a building, and forget to mention the style of its architecture, or he will mention an avenue of trees but take no note of their species, or he will talk of a valley and mountains without giving any idea of their proportions. Sometimes a describer will waste valuable space in absurd comparisons that lead the unwary wrong, when fewer words might have given a truer picture. Even in conver- sation, with the great help of questions, we are sometimes strangely baffled by the want of describing power in others. They have been to some place that we are interested in, but we meet with the utmost difficulty in getting a clear account of it out of them. As for the vice of false sentiment it is one that is very easily cured. A writer has nothing to do but to ask himself whether he really feels the emotions that he connects with the natural scene. Do the bright, dancing waves of the Mediterranean make him feel gay in the southern sunshine } Does the gloomy calm of the Highland loch make him really feel oppressed and sad .'' If they do so much it is only a part of veracity to describe these effects upon the mind, but if it does not matter to him what may be the moods of nature, and he pretends to be affected by them that he may produce an impressive paragraph, then I should say that his false senti- ment will very probably be found out, and that even if undetected it is superfluous. LANDSCAPE. CHAPTER VIII. Land and Sea in the Odyssey. I TAKE the Odyssey as a subject of study, rather than both the Homeric poems, because a limit is convenient in materials when it is imposed in space, and also because the references to nature are more frequent in the tale of Odysseus than in the history of the Trojan War. My quotations shall be made from the English prose translation by Butcher and Lang, because they will interrupt the reader less than quotations from the original Greek and fit better into the texture of my own prose, whilst the fidelity of such a translation makes it almost as useful for our present purpose as the original, the chief loss being the majesty of the versification, only to be felt by the small minority who unite accomplished scholarship to an appreciation of poetic art in language, and imperfectly even by them. Homer is not a picturesque author in the conscious modern way. He does not set himself to describe and produce effects, does not study the art of word-painting, and has not either the strength of affection for nature that makes a modern poet dwell upon the details of a scene, or the con- sciousness of pictorial power that makes him take a pride in elaborating a description. Still, there was in Homer a sentiment with regard to nature which, though not that of a landscape-painter, was strong and genuine in its way. He was nearer to nature than many a literary man of the present. There is, in his poetry, a frequently expressed sense of contact with the natural world which, if not quite the same thing as picturesque enthusiasm, is at least equally refreshing. All who have been brought close to nature by the experiences of wild travel, or by life in places not yet spoilt by mechanical civilisation, feel that Homer had lived in their world, that world in which life is natural yet, and where strength and courage may increase themselves by healthy exercise. This feeling of contact with nature is, to me, one of the most delightful associations of the Odyssey. The account of the landing after the adventure on the raft is as close to the real thing as a passage from Robinson Crusoe : ' He rose from the line of the breakers that belch upon the shore, and swam outside, ever looking landwards, to find, if he might, spits that take the waves aslant and havens of the sea. But when he came in his swimming over against LAND AND SEA IN THE ODYSSEY. 53 the mouth of a fair-flowing river, whereby the place seemed best in his eyes, smooth of rocks, and withal there was a covert from the wind, Odyssetis felt the river running, and prayed to him in his heart.' The river-god hears the prayer, but Odysseus does not feel himself to be out of danger yet, for the following reasons : — ' If I watch in the river-bed all through the careful night I fear that the bitter frost and fresh dew may overcome vie, and I breathe forth my life for faintness, for the river breeze blows cold betimes in the morning* But if I climb the hillside up to the shady wood, and there take rest in the thickets, though perchance the cold and weariness leave hold of me, and sweet sleep come over me, I fear lest of wild beasts I become the spoil and prey.' The passage I have italicised is clear evidence that the poet himself had sometimes passed a night in the open air. The same knowledge of rough life is shown by the description of the swineherd's choice of a place of rest when Odysseus has come to Ithaca : — ' Then he went to lay him down even where the white-tusked boars were sleeping, beneath the hollow of the rock, in a place of shelter from tlu north wind.' Odysseus, after landing from the raft, went up to the wood and there crept beneath some bushes. A common poet would have been satisfied with the general term, but Homer tells us that they were twin bushes of olive, and that one of them was wild olive : — ' Through these the force of the wet winds blew never, neither did the bright sun light on it with his rays, nor could the rain pierce through, so close were they twined either to other, and thereunder crept Odysseus.' The strong and simple sense of reality which always distinguishes Homer is conspicuous in the washing of Odysseus. In the fresh river water he 'washed from his skin the salt scurf that covered his back and broad shoulders, and from his head he wiped the crusted brine of the barren sea.' Homer always seems to have accurate local knowledge, even of imaginary places, a characteristic so valuable for giving reality to a narrative that it has often been assumed or imitated by succeeding writers. He knows that, in Calypso's island, the tall trees grew on the border, and that the species of them were alder, poplar, and pine. He gives quite a minute account of the island outside the harbour of the land of the Cyclopes, ' neither nigh at hand nor yet far off, a woodland isle.' ' Yea, it is in no wise a sorry land, but would bear all things in their season, * In the original, 'before daybreak.' 54 LANDSCAPE. for therein are soft water-meadows by the shores of the grey salt sea, and there the vines know no decay and the land is level to plough. Also there is a fair haven, where is no need of moorings, either to cast anchor or to fasten hawsers, but men may run the ship on the beach, and tarry until such time as the sailors are minded to be gone and favourable breezes blow. Now at the head of the harbour is a well of bright water issuing from a cave, and round it are poplars growing.' This minuteness in describing imaginary localities was due to the accurate observation of real ones. The character of Ithaca is alluded to at different times, and always strongly marked. It is contrasted by Telemachus with the landscape character of Pylos when he declines the offer of horses from Menelaus. Telemachus says he will not take horses to Ithaca because 'there are no wide courses, nor meadow-land at all,' but his local affection breaks out in the exclamation that it is a pasture- land of goats, • and more pleasant in my sight than one that pastureth horses.' Still, he appreciates the plain as a good place for pasturage and driving. Athene describes Ithaca to Odysseus on his return with reference to the same rugged local character : — ' Verily it is rough, and not fit for the driving of horses, yet it is not a very sorry isle, though narrow withal. For herein is corn past telling, and herein, too, wine is found, and the rain is on it evermore, and the fresh dew. And it is good for feeding goats and feeding kine ; all manner of wood is here, and watering- places unfailing are herein.' And when Athene sheds a mist about Odysseus that he may not recognise Ithaca, we are told that all things showed strange to him, ' the long paths and the sheltering havens, and the steep rocks and the trees in their bloom.' In the drive of Peisistratus and Telemachus from the house of Nestor at Pylos, the horses 'flew toward the plain, and left the steep citadel of Pylos.' They put up for the night at the house of Diodes, and next day the drive is continued in a decidedly lowland country, * the wheat- bearing plain,' and they drive on till all the ways are darkened. Finally they come to Lacedaemon, 'lying low among the caverned hills.' Aided by these brief indications we imagine the landscape through which the swift horses speeded on their way. Odysseus has a sailor- like way of climbing a hill for a look-out. In his account of his own travels he tells King Alcinous that he ' went up a craggy hill, a place of outlook, and saw the smoke rising from the broad-wayed earth in the halls of Circe through the thick coppice and the woodland.' He had also a sailor's appreciation of a good harbour, for wherever there is one it is mentioned just as a sailor LAND AND SEA IN THE ODYSSEY. 55 of our own day would mention it. The adualitd of Homer is indeed so striking in this respect that the most modern travellers remind us of him.* Here is one example out of many. When Odysseus and his companions are sent away from the Court of Aeolus they sail for six days and arrive on the seventh at the stronghold of Lamos. See how minute is the description of the haven: — 'Thither when we had come to the fair haven, whereabout on both sides goes one steep cliff unbroken, and jutting headlands over against each other stretch forth at the mouth of the harbour, and straight is the entrance ; thereinto all the others steered their curved ships. Now the vessels were bound within the hollow harbour each hard by the other, for no wave ever swelled within it, great or small, but there was a bright calm all around. But I alone moored my dark ship without the harbour, at the uttermost point thereof, and made fast the hawser to a rock.' The descriptions of the sea in Homer are powerful in this sense, that they convey to the reader the feeling of its presence or neigh- bourhood. In this way it has come to pass that the Homeric poems, especially the tale of Odysseus, are closely associated with the sea, an association of which Mr. Lang has made excellent use in his two beautiful sonnets on the Odyssey. It is, however, easy to make too much of Homer's marine descriptions. They are, after all, only a form of early art, and it is a mistake to attribute to them the qualities of cultivated observation. A word or two of reality brings us from time to time to the sea-shore or the tossing waves, and we are grateful. When the maidens of Nausicaa have unharnessed the mules they drive them ' along the banks of the eddying river to graze on the honey-sweet clover,' and when they have washed the linen they ' spread it all out in order along the shore of the deep, even where the sea, in beating on the coast, washed the pebbles clean! Nothing can exceed the freshness of this touch. For brief descriptions of the power of wave and wind you have only to turn to any of the pages where the mariners are thwarted by the gods. There is an expression in the twelfth book about the sea darkening under a dark cloud which is the most pictorial bit of marine description in the narrative : — ' But now, when we left, that isle nor any other land appeared, but sky and sea only, even then the son of Cronos stayed a dark cloud above the hollow ship and beneath it tJie deep darkened.' * A few hours before writing the above lines I had a conversation with an old naval ofScer about the Mediterranean, and noticed that he talked about the harbours (in the Grecian Archipelago and elsewhere) quite in the Homeric manner. 56 LANDSCAPE. Whilst Odysseus is on the raft, Poseidon smites it with two exceptionally great waves, the last so powerful that it separates the timbers : — 'While yet he pondered these things in his heart and soul, Poseidon, shaken of the earth, stirred against him a great wave, terrible and grievous, and vaulted from the crest, and therewith smote him. And as when a great tempestuous wind tosseth a heap of parched husks, and scatters them this way and that, even so did the wave scatter the long beams of the raft.' The epithet here translated ' vaulted from the crest ' is the mark of additional power in this wave. The first is not so described, it was only a great wave, but this is a great overhanging wave that comes crashing down (what we call a breaker), and so it severs the beams of the raft. The description of water-action in Charybdis, with its mightily pulsating rise and fall, is so real as to have been plainly suggested by something observed in nature either in river or sea: — 'On the one hand lay Scylla, and on the other mighty Charybdis in terrible wise sucked down the salt sea water. As often as she belched it forth, like a cauldron on a great fire, she would seethe up through all her troubled deeps, and overhead the spray fell on the tops of either cliff. But oft as she gulped down the salt sea water, within she was all plain to see through her troubled deeps, and the rock around roared horribly and beneath the earth was manifest swart with sand.' From all these extracts it is plain that Homer's close intimacy with nature was rather the practical knowledge of a traveller, sailor, breeder, agriculturist, than that delicate observation of forms, effects, and colour, which must enter into the training of a modern landscape-painter. This is a distinction which does not imply censure, as literature is an art quite separate from painting. A writer can bring to the mind recollections of other than ocular perceptions. In Homer we hear the shrill winds blowing in the wake of the hollow ship ; we feel the flow of the river ; we climb the rough track up to the wooded country ; we taste of the honey-sweet lotus ; but although the Homeric descriptions have often suggested ideas to painters, they are hardly ever in themselves pictorial. The all but complete absence of colour is a well - known negative characteristic ; and it has been inferred that in Homer's time the colour- sense was in a rudimentary condition. Magnus says that Homer uses y\oip6