it may be all very
well--but "is it true?" But we have another fault to find with
Turner's figures; they are often bad in intention. What can be more
absurd and incongruous, for instance, than in a picture of "elemental
war"--a sea-coast--than to put a child and its nurse in foreground,
the child crying because it has lost its hoop, or some such thing? It
is according to his truth of space, that distances should have every
"hair's-breadth" filled up, all its "infinity," with infinities of
objects, but that whatever is near, if figures, may be "pink spots,"
and "four dashes of the brush." While with Poussin--"masses which
result from the eclipse of details are contemptible and painful;" and
he thinks Poussin has but "meaningless tricks of clever
execution"--forgetting that all art is but a trick--yet one of those
tricks worth knowing, and yet which how few have acquired! Surely our
author is not well acquainted with Hobbima's works; that painter had
not a niggling execution. "A single dusty roll of Turner's brush is
more truly expressive of the infinity of foliage, than the niggling of
Hobbima could have rendered his canvass, if he had worked on it till
doomsday." Our author seems to have studied skies, such as they are in
Turner or in nature. He talks of them with no inconsiderable swagger
of observation, while the old masters had no observation at
all;--"their blunt and feelingless eyes never perceived it in nature;
and their untaught imaginations were not likely to originate it in
study." What is the _it_, will be asked--we believe it to be a
"cirrus," and that a cirrus is the subject of a chapter to itself.
This beard of the sky, however, instead of growing below, is quite
above, "never formed below an elevation of at least 15,000 feet, are
motionless, multitudinous lines of delicate vapour, with which the
blue of the open sky is commonly streaked or speckled after several
days of fine weather. They are more commonly known as 'mare's tails.'"
Having found this "mare's nest," he delights in it. It is the glory of
modern masters. He becomes inflated, and lifts himself 15,000 feet
above the level of the understanding of all old masters, and, as we
think, of most modern readers, as thus:--"One alone has taken notice
of the neglected upper sky; it is his peculiar and favourite field; he
has watched its every modification, and given its every phase and
feature; at all hours, in all seasons, he has followed its passions
an