AND ANOTHER THING
Nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon? I disagree
PAUL JOHNSON
In that marvellous moonlit scene in the last act of The Merchant of Venice, when the victors of the play break into joyful poetry as the moon flits in and out of the clouds, Portia notes that its sudden masking by vapour switches on the stellar incandes- cence. She points to a star and exclaims:
How far that little candle throws his beams. So shines a good deed in naughty world!
and Nerissa replies, 'When the moon shone we did not see that candle.' It is true. A big harvest moon puts out the stars in its por- tion of the sky, though at the perimeter of its light they and the planets shine even more piercingly than usual, so clear is the night.
Moonlight, as it dodges among the cloud- scape, often seems sinister. Tennyson, in `Locicsley Hall', compares the sun to a straightforward man and the moon to a devious woman. But in the cloudless night skies of August the full moon is benign, tender, silver-gilt, almost golden, no sug- gestion of ice about it. It is fruitful, nourish- ing, warming even.
Strong moon- or starlight always makes me think of prehistoric man. I imagine him at night, restless, unable to sleep, looking up at the sky and wondering what it all meant. Or I see a group of these prog- nathous, hirsute creatures lying compan- ionably round the dying embers of their fire, not brutal savages but earnest, yearn- ing, tender-hearted men and women, as sensitive as we are, and far less complacent in their anxious quest for knowledge, mut- tering to each other and asking questions. How far away is that huge light in the sky? Is it alive? And, if so, is it male or female? Does it have children, as we do? And are they those lesser lights we see? Thinking thus, the other night, it seemed to me strange that primitive man can have so easily accepted the illusion that the world is flat. Staring at the moon, I could feel its movement in relation to the earth, and the earth's corresponding surge. In this minute but constant change of physical jux- taposition, there was no impression of flat stability at all.
In Chapter Two of Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy noticed this effect, produced when the night is exceptionally clear, the moon shows all, and the stars appear to burn, 'To persons standing alone on a hill during a clear midnight such as this, the roll of the world eastwards is a pal- pable movement.' I felt that roll. I saw the horizon of the Quantock Hills, dipping down into the Somerset Levels, then into the headlands of the Bristol Channel, and so across it into South Wales, faintly visible — I saw this immense landscape not as a linear infinity but as a curve, part of a gigantic sphere. It seemed to me I was standing on a large, sloping platform, trav- elling in space. Strong moonlight lowers the horizon, makes us more conscious of the earth's position in space, and of its marginality, its insignificance.
It was not hard for me to imagine, from my own untutored visual impressions, the essential structure of the universe, and it seemed to me odd that early man had not perceived it too. But then I was standing on the shoulders of Galileo and Newton and Einstein, and early man was just a lone, unsupported creature, lying on the stony ground and trying to work it all out for him- self. As H.G. Wells pointed out, primitive Homo sapiens, in his ignorant terror, where all creation seemed hostile, had to draw upon reserves of courage we would find unattainable. Thinking about those distant forebears always makes me humble.
Granted the insights into nature which a powerful moon provides, it is surprising that so few artists have painted it. But then it isn't easy — I have tried. The moonshine is rarely strong enough to enable you to see your paints properly, let alone to get the colours right. Despite the effulgence, you are working in the dark.
Samuel Palmer was good at harvest moons, but then I suspect he painted from memory: there is more symbolism than verisimilitude. I have seen some good Winslow Homer moonscapes, in mountain lake country, and one or two Sargents but then he could paint anything to perfec- tion. Old Atkinson Grimshaw loved a good moon too; but, having once acquired the knack of bathing a Victorian dockside in moonlight, he repeated himself.
The finest painting of moonlight I know is that great Turner canvas in the Washing- ton National Gallery, `Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Night'. Here is a virtuoso study of contrasting lights, for the powerful moon is not only struggling against thin cloud but challenged by the fierce flares of the toiling heavers, flames emitting tiny, dense clouds of smoke which drift across the moonlight and distort it. The sea, the mirror of all this conflict of illumination, is Turner at his most precise and magical. And all this was painted in the studio — from notes and sketches, no doubt — by a master whose visual memory was so intense that he could recall every detail of a giant three-decker's rigging and trim years after he had banked it in his mind.
At the end of the week, however, I found something I could paint as, early on a cloudless day of brazen sunlight, I entered the great gardens of Stourhead. Nothing by the graceful Le Notre in France, nothing by those cunning cardinal-gardeners in Tivoli, can compare with this masterpiece of nature nurtured into art. It is the finest thing of its kind in the world. Its elements are quite simple: mature trees, to be sure in infinite variety and hue, gently sloping greensward, still waters and the classical stonework of bridge and temple. All the art is in the arranging of the forms so that they reflect the sunlight, and each other, in har- monious justice.
This garden is now as close to perfection as it ever will be, and I sat down on a mossy stone bench to get it onto paper with vora- cious appetite. I worked fast, even by my standards, conscious that my two lady com- panions, who had walked on to the Nep- tune grotto and round the lake, would soon be back, impatiently demanding our return for breakfast. Perhaps because of the speed, for once it worked, and in less than an hour it was all there. Moonlight is for poets, but sunlight is for painters. Reader, I wish I could show it to you.
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