BOOKS.
MR. HAMERTON ON LANDSCAPE.*
WHAT would "that uncouth and ungracious genius, Thomas Carlyle" (the phrase is Mr. Hamerton's), with his horror of descriptions and view-hunters as hateful things born of the corruption of evil days, have said to this big book—a book, judging from the title, all about "views "? Perhaps the methodical, clear intelligence displayed in it, as well as the evidence it affords of strong poetical feeling and sympathy with many things besides "views," would have made Carlyle pardon its existence, or even, like ourselves, welcome it as a good sign of the times, if only he had been possessed of a grain of feeling for pictorial art, or been capable of a moment's trust in the landscape-painter as a real interpreter of Nature. But we must let Mr. Hamerton give his own description of the nature of his work. He has not intended it, he says, to be "a treatise upon landscape-painting either from the technical or msthetic side, or even to be by any means exclusively a treatise on landscape in Nature." "His dominant idea has been the influence of landscape on man." At the outset he clears the ground by a chapter on "illusions," starting from the fact that we see each our own world of forms and colours, and that colour-sensations vary to infinity with different human idiosyncrasies. With respect to the latter assertion, we are disposed to think that, so far as those who have any colour-sense at all are concerned, there is a nearer approach to agreement and better means of testing that agreement than he supposes ; but we shall speak of this point in connection with another question farther on. There can be no doubt, however, about the strong affinities which we feel for certain scenes or kinds of scenery, or that happiness depends a good deal more than is commonly supposed, as Mr. Hamerton says, on the suitability of our landscape environment, or, at all events, on our power of obtaining that suitability, to some degree. He points out the difference between a strong man's landscape and a weak one's, as shown in Byron's stormy love of Alp and Apennine and untamed Nature generally, and Cowper's pensive enjoyment of the tranquillities of Olney. He does not, by the way, give Byron credit for his greater comprehensiveness of landscape affection. The author of the stanza which contains the well-known lines,— " A green field is a sight which makes us pardon The absence of that more sublime construction," &c., was probably quite as capable of enjoying the restfulness of a fair meadow as the delicate poet-recluse who could not have enjoyed the stronger poet's mountains. We may remark also, as an instance of the revolutions of feeling even in these things, how strangely mountains have declined in favour with our landscape-painters since the days of Cox and Robson. In the chapter on Nature's power over us, we have the first hint of what we consider a diQposition, .on Mr. Hamerton's part, to regard the two elements of art-production,—namely, love of natural fact and impulse of artistic expression,—too much as things distinctly apart from each other in the artist's mind, instead of mental activities entirely fused together in the working of the imagination. He speaks of "those for whom Art is first and Nature only a mine of materials," as being "less the slaves of Nature" than others who are fascinated, to their hurt as artists, by admiration of landscape-beauty. This qrrangement of Art and Nature as separate aims or influences may be accepted, for convenience' sake, to remind us of the fact that some artists have a stronger sense of art-form and completeness than others with whom greed of acquisitiveness in the study of facts. is a marked characteristic; but we venture to think that no one who was in the habit of regarding Nature as "only a mine of materials," ever became a very great, or more than a very clever, artist. It is submission to the fascination of Nature, in a capable brain, which creates and sustains the idealising faculty. We doubt if an artist consciously refers from Nature to Art in his best moments—least of all an artist endowed with great arranging and inventive power. Such men, as a role, prefer to be fascinated, and work straightforwardly—like Michael Angelo and Turner--in the strength of their impressions. Mr. Hamerton thinks that Constable and even Wordsworth, with whom Nature was decidedly first, were, in some degree, too much her slaves; or rather, sacrificed something to their intense affection for particular kinds of scenery. We do not think that a milder love of Flatford would have made Constable a better draughtsman or a more subtle master of light and shade ; or that Wordsworth would have been a whit less ready to slip into prosiness if he had subdued his passion for the beauty of Westmoreland,— a beauty which, we cannot help saying, was then far beyond anything we can conceive from the Westmoreland of to-day. The faults and limitations of either artist were due to other causes than that of being enslaved by Nature. At the close of this chapter, however, Mr. Hamerton gives the true secret of the power of landscape over us. We ourselves believe that it is not possible to overrate the ennobling and purifying power of the landscape-loving instinct in minds which are conscious of it at all. We do not mean merely the pleasure, great and thoroughly good in its way, which we all feel in breathing purer air than usual, even if it is not "the difficult air of the iced mountain-top," and in having the sky-line changed for us pleasantly from day to day by new ranges of peaks and crags. There are those to whom landscape-beauty peaks with the power of a Divine message, direct and unmistakeable, whose sympathies with humanity and sense of duty are quickened, never overpowered, by the joy of watching the drama of landscape,—its swift changes of splendour and gloom,—or of sharing, as it were, in "only silent Nature's breathing life." Mr. Hamerton uses words which show' how completely he is at one with those who, in contemplating such beauty, are conscious of a special "expression of the mysterious energy to which the order of the Universe is due.'
We do not find in the poets who, from the author of theOdyssey downward, are briefly criticised as exponents of feeling for landscape, any recognition of this its spiritual influence, until we come to modern times and to Wordsworth. Mr. Hamerton does not quote Milton in his present work, although in his life of Turner he has noticed how often in descriptions of the peculiar scenery of Paradise Lost Milton's treatment of a subject is akin to what Turner's would have been. Wordsworth rendered mankind the service of putting the reality of this spiritual influence beyond dispute. It is notable that neither in his case nor in Turner's was the love of inanimate nature, although amounting to a passion, inconsistent, so far as Art was concerned, with interest of especial strength in figures of the most realistic and homely kind.
We have nothing but praise for Mr. Hamerton's own descriptions of the different kinds of landscape and their components. Mountains, rocks, trees, lakes, navigable rivers,. canoe rivers,—the lover of each of these will find delightful reading in his pages. But his subjects lead him to deal with landscape as apprehended by the landscape-painter, and with the painters themselves as more or less successful in their efforts to represent it. No parts of his work will be read with moreinterest than these. He dues not a few things for which all landscape-painters will thank him. He points out the amazingdifficulty of their work, and does a little (would that he could do more !) to warn-off aspirants to the high office of interpreting Nature by paint, who rush on where their forerunners coulil tell of little awaiting them but constant toil and wearying defeat. Success does not, indeed, depend on luck, but on something which looks very like it,—some 'special gift, or combination of gifts, of which the existence cannot be foretold, or tested except by long, often life-long, and life-exhausting trial. A landscape-painter succeeds, Mr. Hamerton thinks, who hits upon some expression of his own view of Nature which is intelligible to other people._ The discovery, by genuine hard work, perhaps, of a mode of expression which is trite, but only intelligible to the artist himself,—even though it deserves to he intelligible to everybody else, as embracing a larger amount of truth than was ever embraced before,—will bring him no recognition ; it may be wanting in some pleasantness which the public of the day demands, or be a generation or two in advance of them in its truth. We should be inclined to say ourselves that almost any one quality in landscape, grasped at the cost of every other, would, with perseverance, make an artist's success.. Then the discipline to be gone through ! A student hewill be all his life ; but the struggle for imitative skill must be over before he can use his imagination freely.. Mr. Hamerton has done well in pointing out how much the stupendous truths we learn from science have increased and intensified our interest in scenery. They have assuredly put an end to many short methods landscapists were wont to use in dealing with it. Rocks that are no rocks, for instance, are a trifle less frequent in our exhibitions than they used to be.. The least thoughtful of sketchers in Welsh hollow or Highland glen now-a-days has a notion of the fact that glacier-ice roundel the rock on which he sits and hollowed the lake-bed. We thank Mr. Himerton also for maintaining that want of human interest, properly so-called, in a landscape-picture may be atoned for by the clear presence of the human feeling which animates the work.
But there is a shade of objection which we are fain to urge against his view of the relation between love of the facts of Nature and the imaginative presentation of them. The imagination is not with him, we should say, a truth-loving faculty, but as regards pictures, only a pleasure-loving one. He puts well and strongly the difference in kind between the work of the transcriber, copyist, or student, for any reason whatever, of the strictly literal fact, and the imaginative artist (" an artist," he says, "no more copies a view than a novelist reports a conversation "); but he always writes as if the poetical landscape-painter, while bidding farewell to the topographical limitations and fettering accuracies of a scene, bade farewell to his own honest impression of the facts of it, instead of doing his best to put into art-shape as much of the force, fulness, and fascination of the reality as the conditions of art will allow him to do. There is something almost sad to us, if we may say so, in Mr. Hamerton's exquisitely keen, affectionate perception of landscape-beauty of the highest kind, associated with his resolute despair of the possibility of its being ever truthfully or adequately portrayed by art. He will not acquiesce in unfaithful drawing and wild exaggerations of his favourite themes, but seems inclined to relinquish them as subjects of art altogether. This is exactly what French landscapists have done. They confine themselves to subjects which are well within the reach of Art; and if they -deal with greater, make no pretence of treating them except in conventional terms. Nothing could be more opposed to an English landscape-painter's ideas than such sentences as these : —" So soon as the desire is to make a picture and not a study, the artist no longer makes his canvas a mirror of the natural
world." And again To an artist with strong local affections -there is something unsatisfactory in having to use so much craft and guile to paint a place as ills not."
Now, in another branch of Art, to "hold a mirror up to Nature" is never taken to mean disregard of Nature, even though large licence is used in order to meet the special conditions of that art. Why should the landscape-painter's "desire to make -a picture instead of a study" mean abandonment of truth because he wishes to emphasise it by force of Art ? Again, why paint a local subject, unless his affections have attached themselves strongly to some qualities, lines, masses, or colours which he feels that painting can give P Would it be right to say, in such a case, that he desires "to paint the place as it is not," if he omits or glides over those which art-instinct tells him his art at all events cannot give ? Why, above all, should he be careless about good drawing, when his affection would lead him to desire earnestly the best gifts of perception and refined drawing, so that no point of character in the place he loves should escape him ? The fact that "the splendour of natural landscape lies beyond the artist's range of light" has this effect, .among many others, that it makes criticism of a landscapepainter's work beyond measure difficult. Conventions, exaggerations, omissions, are forced upon the artist who dares to take natural beauty or splendour for his subject,—but the exaggera tions of mere ignorance, dull conventionality, or bad drawing are one thing ; those of enthusiasm, with good drawing at command, are another. Many of the glaring disagreements about
,colour-truth, which Mr. Hamerton finds among artists, may be
resolved into differences of choice of this or that key or tone of colour as the best to meet this difficulty of rendering light and colour in landscape. A group of colourista (for there is such a thing as partial colour-blindness even among artists) set to copy any piece of "local" colour would show agreement enough in their imitation of it.
Not the least important feature in the book is the number of most interesting engravingsof various kinds, freely interspersed amongst its pages, as if there were the least chance of Mr.
Haraerton's good writing not being enough to charm us. Mr. Brandard's engraving of "Fishing Boats," after Turner (the last in the book), proves beyond dispute that we have one engraver at least who is capable of doing justice to the finest qualities of landscape work. The photo-gravure of Mr. Peter Graham's deservedly famous picture, "A Spate in the Ilighlands," does not by any means do it justice.
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