SECTION XV.

On Landscape.

OUR intellectual tastes should elevate and purify our natures; but, in some directions, they are not inapt to degenerate into mere luxurious indulgences, and a long catalogue might be made out of gross and selfish men, who have yet been patrons of Art. But the love of landscape is a love so pure, that it can never associate with the relishes of a mere voluptuary, and wherever such a love is native, it is the certain indication of a superior mind. Shakspeare sends us to find

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tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

Tongues and books that never lie,-sermons direct to the heart, and good unmixed with evil; and the man must be hopelessly wicked, or woefully blinded by passion, who can plan or commit a wrong act while these are addressing him.

How fine a scene is that in "The Antiquary," where Edie Ochiltree tries to prevent the duel between Lovel and M'Intyre! "What are you come here for, young men?' he said; ' are you come among the most lovely works of God to break His laws? Have you left the

works of man, the houses and the cities, that are but clay and dust, like those that built them; and are ye come here among the peaceful hills, and by the quiet waters, that will last whiles aught earthly shall endure, to destroy each other's lives?""

Such is the moral influence of Landscape, to which no great painter was ever indifferent; nor can we imagine any painter indifferent to its material beauty. And yet Leonardo da Vinci tells us that his friend Boticello "had a particular pique against landscapes, and thought them much beneath his application; the effect of which was, that being a very sorry landscapepainter, his merit in other matters was less regarded. It was a saying of his, that a palette full of colours being thrown against the wall would leave a stain behind it properly enough representing a landscape."

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Leonardo prefaces this account by remarking that a painter who is not equally pleased with all parts of his art, will never become universal." And I will add that even a painter who should confine himself to in-door subjects, cannot represent an open window truly without some practical knowledge of landscape; and the greatest historical and portrait painters have invariably studied it, not from pictures only, but from the reality. Titian seems to have done that for inanimate nature which Michael Angelo did for human form, in giving to it a grandeur unknown before in Art; and the background of the "Peter Martyr" has been considered to mark an important epoch in the history of landscape, being equally admirable for its greatness and its finish.

The right appreciation of this lovely branch of

Painting has suffered, like all the others, by classification. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who does justice to the genius of Gainsborough, refuses to rank his landscape with poetic Art, and this could only arise from its not being connected, like the landscape of Poussin and Sebastian Bourdon, with classic incident; for if Burns, in describing the banks of the Doon, writes as a poet, why may not Gainsborough, with his extreme sensibility to every beauty of Nature, paint like one, though he take for his subject the most familiar scenery of his own country?—I should say that if ever landscape was poetic on canvas, it is such landscape as his. Constable, in speaking of one of his pictures, a work almost without details, said, “I cannot think of it even now without tears in my eyes;-with particulars he had nothing to do, his object was to deliver a fine sentiment, and he has fully accomplished it."

I can understand that a taste requiring a literal completion of particulars will never be satisfied with Gainsborough. Indeed, those who feel what he accomplished, must often be content, like Cordelia, to "love and be silent;" cavils, they will find themselves unable to answer, will not disturb their enjoyment—an enjoyment they cannot make intelligible to minds not constituted or trained to receive it, however they may feel sure that it is based on a genuine love of Nature.

The faults of the highest Art may be easily and clearly described by words; but there are literally no words for its most refined beauties, nor are there any words to express the want of those beauties in Art

that has all the ordinary appearances of truth. Hence those plausible styles, that form the staple of our exhibitions, and that fill our print-shop windows, are safe from criticism and easily extolled; and the advantages to be derived from language being on the side of inferior Art, nothing has been more common than for great artists to be talked down and indifferent ones talked up. Hogarth was talked down, and Penny, a now forgotten painter, talked up by no less a critic than Barry. Wilson and Gainsborough were talked down, while Smith, of Chichester, and Barrett were talked up. Stothard, Flaxman, and Constable suffered, when living, the same kind of depreciation, while lesser artists were praised and patronised ;and Turner, when in the meridian of his glory, was ridiculed without mercy by the fashionable leaders of

taste.

Rocks, trees, mountains, plains, and waters, are the features of landscape, but its expression is from above; and it is scarcely metaphorical to say Nature smiles, or weeps, and is tranquil, sad, or disturbed with rage, as the atmosphere affects her. Hence the paramount importance of the sky in landscape,—an importance not diminished, even when it forms but a small portion of the composition.

"There is not a moment of any day of our lives," says Mr. Ruskin, "when Nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever

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placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly. The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them; he injures them by his presence, he ceases to feel them if he be always with them but the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not "Too bright nor good

For human nature's daily food;'

it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for soothing it and purifying it from its dross and dust."

And yet many are the landscape-painters who seem, in their studies from Nature, as if they had never raised their eyes above the horizon; and among the proofs of the indifference of those who interest themselves in Art to the beauty that canopies the earth, may be noticed that, although the composition, and light and shade of clouds are as much within the reach of the photographic art as any of the other great things of Nature, they are her only beauties it has hitherto entirely neglected. I have seen but two calotypes of skies, and these (taken by my friend, Mr. Thurston Thompson) prove that it is from no want of power in the process that skies are not as common in our photographic exhibitions as any other subjects.

Turner's transcendant power of expressing atmospheric phenomena more than atoned for eccentricities that would have ruined a lesser man and Constable spent entire summers in painting skies from Nature. In a letter to a friend, dated October