Lectures on Landscape | Page 2

One is a beautiful harmony of cool color; and the other of hot, and they
are both exquisitely designed in ornamental lines. But they are not
painted for those qualities. They are painted because the state of the
scene in one case is full of delight to men; and in the other of pain and
danger. And it is not Turner's object at all to exhibit or illustrate natural
phenomena, however interesting in themselves.
[Illustration: VESUVIUS IN ERUPTION.
From the painting by Turner.]
He does not want to paint blue mist in order to teach you the nature of
evaporation; nor this lava stream, to explain to you the operation of
gravity on ponderous and viscous materials. He paints the blue mist,
because it brings life and joy to men, and the lava stream because it is
death to them.
5. Again here are two sea-pieces by Turner of the same
period--photographs from them at least. One is a calm on the shore at
Scarborough; the other the wreck of an Indiaman.
These also are each painted with exquisitely artistic purpose: the first in
opposition of local black to diffused sunshine; the second in the
decorative grouping of white spots on a dark ground. That decorative
purpose of dappling, or [Greek: poikilia], is as studiously and

deliciously carried out by Turner with the Dædalus side of him, in the
inlaying of these white spots on the Indiaman's deck, as if he were
working a precious toy in ebony and ivory. But Turner did not paint
either of the sea-pieces for the sake of these decorous arrangements;
neither did he paint the Scarborough as a professor of physical science,
to show you the level of low tide on the Yorkshire coast; nor the
Indiaman to show you the force of impact in a liquid mass of sea-water
of given momentum. He painted this to show you the daily course of
quiet human work and happiness, and that, to enable you to conceive
something of uttermost human misery--both ordered by the power of
the great deep.
6. You may easily--you must, perhaps, for a little time--suspect me of
exaggeration in this statement. It is so natural to suppose that the main
interest of landscape is essentially in rocks and water and sky; and that
figures are to be put, like the salt and mustard to a dish, only to give it a
flavor.
Put all that out of your heads at once. The interest of a landscape
consists wholly in its relation either to figures present--or to figures
past--or to human powers conceived. The most splendid drawing of the
chain of the Alps, irrespective of their relation to humanity, is no more
a true landscape than a painting of this bit of stone. For, as natural
philosophers, there is no bigness or littleness to you. This stone is just
as interesting to you, or ought to be--as if it was a million times as big.
There is no more sublimity--per se--in ground sloped at an angle of
forty-five, than in ground level; nor in a perpendicular fracture of a
rock, than in a horizontal one. The only thing that makes the one more
interesting to you in a landscape than the other, is that you could
tumble over the perpendicular fracture--and couldn't tumble over the
other. A cloud, looked at as a cloud only, is no more a subject for
painting than so much feculence in dirty water. It is merely dirty air, or
at best a chemical solution ill made. That it is worthy of being painted
at all depends upon its being the means of nourishment and
chastisement to men, or the dwelling place of imaginary gods. There's a
bit of blue sky and cloud by Turner--one of the loveliest ever painted
by human hand. But, as a mere pattern of blue and white, he had better

have painted a jay's wing: this was only painted by him--and is, in
reality, only pleasant to you--because it signifies the coming of a gleam
of sweet sunshine in windy weather; and the wind is worth thinking of
only because it fills the sails of ships, and the sun because it warms the
sailors.
7. Now, it is most important that you should convince yourselves of
and fully enter into this truth, because all the difficulty in choosing
subject arises from mistakes about it. I daresay some of you who are
fond of sketching have gone out often in the most beautiful country,
and yet with the feeling that there was no good subject to be found in it.
That always arises from your not having sympathy enough with its vital
character, and looking for physical picturesqueness instead. On the
contrary, there are crude efforts at landscape-painting, made
continually upon the most splendid physical phenomena,