Chapter XVII: Resulting Forms:--Fourthly, Banks (2)

Sec. 43. I do not, indeed, know if the examples I have given from natural scenes, though they are as characteristic as I could well choose, are enough to accustom the reader to the character of true mountain lines, and to enable him to recognize such lines in other instances; but if not, at all events they may serve to elucidate the main points, and guide to more complete examination of the subject, if it interests him, among the hills themselves. And if, after he has pursued the inquiry long enough to feel the certitude of the laws which I have been endeavoring to illustrate, he turns back again to art, I am well assured it will be with a strange recognition of unconceived excellence, and a newly quickened pleasure in the unforeseen fidelity, that he will trace the pencilling of Turner upon his hill drawings. I do not choose to spend, in this work, the labor and time which would be necessary to analyze, as I have done the drawing of the St. Gothard, any other of Turner's important mountain designs; for the reader must feel the disadvantage they are under in being either reduced in scale, or divided into fragments: and therefore these chapters are always to be considered merely as memoranda for reference before the pictures which the reader may have it in his power to examine. But this one drawing of the St. Gothard, as it has already elucidated for us Turner's knowledge of crest structure, will be found no less wonderful in the fulness with which it illustrates his perception of the lower aqueous and other curvatures. If the reader will look back to the etching of the entire subject, Plate +21+, he will now discern, I believe, without the necessity of my lettering them for him, the lines of fall, rounded down from the crests until they plunge into the overhanging precipices; the lines of projection, where the fallen stones extend the long concave sweep from the couloir, pushing the torrent against the bank on the other side; in the opening of the ravine he will perceive the oblique and parallel inclination of its sides, following the cleavage of the beds in the diagonal line A B of the reference figure; and, finally, in the great slope and precipice on the right of it, he will recognize one of the grandest types of the peculiar mountain mass which Turner always chose by preference to illustrate, the "slope above wall" of _d_ in Fig. 13, p. 148; compare also the last chapter, Sec.Sec. 26, 27. It will be seen, by reference to my sketch of the spot, Plate +20+, that this conformation does actually exist there with great definiteness: Turner has only enlarged and thrown it into more numerous alternations of light and shade. As these could not be shown in the etching, I have given, in the frontispiece, this passage nearly of its real size: the exquisite greys and blues by which Turner has rounded and thrown it back are necessarily lost in the plate; but the grandeur of his simple cliff and soft curves of sloping bank above is in some degree rendered.

We must yet dwell for a moment on the detail of the rocks on the left in Plate +37+, as they approach nearer the eye, turning at the same time from the light. It cost me trouble to etch this passage, and yet half its refinements are still missed; for Turner has put his whole strength into it, and wrought out the curving of the gneiss beds with a subtlety which could not be at all approached in the time I had to spare for this plate. Enough, however, is expressed to illustrate the points in question.

Sec. 44. We have first, observe, a rounded bank, broken, at its edges, into cleavages by inclined beds. I thought it would be well, lest the reader should think I dwelt too much on this particular scene, to give an instance of similar structure from another spot; and therefore I daguerreotyped the cleavages of a slope of gneiss just above the Cascade des Pelerins, Chamouni, corresponding in position to this bank of Turner's. Plate +48+ (facing p. 303), copied by Mr. Armytage from the daguerreotype, represents, necessarily in a quite unprejudiced and impartial way, the structure at present in question; and the reader may form a sufficient idea, from this plate, of the complexity of descending curve and foliated rent, in even a small piece of mountain foreground,[95] where the gneiss beds are tolerably continuous. But Turner had to add to such general complexity the expression of a more than ordinary undulation in the beds of the St. Gothard gneiss.

Sec. 45. If the reader will look back to Chapter II. Sec. 13, he will find it stated that this scene is approached out of the defile of Dazio Grande, of which the impression was still strong on Turner's mind, and where only he could see, close at hand, the nature of the rocks in a good section. It most luckily happens that De Saussure was interested by the rocks at the same spot, and has given the following account of them, Voyages, Sec.Sec. 1801, 1802:--

"A une lieue de Faido, l'on passe le Tesin pour le repasser bientot apres [see the old bridge in Turner's view, carried away in mine], et l'on trouve sur sa rive droite des couches d'une roche feuilletee, qui montent du Cote du Nord.

"On voit clairement que depuis que les granits veines ont ete remplaces par des pierres moins solides, tantot les rochers se sont eboules et ont ete recouverts par la terre vegetale, tantot leur situation primitive a subi des changements irreguliers.

"Sec. 1802. Mais bientot apres, _on monte par un chemin en corniche au dessus du Tesin, qui se precipite entre des rochers avec la plus grande violence_. Ces rochers sont la si serres, qu'il n'y a de place que pour la riviere et pour le chemin, et meme en quelques endroits, celui-ci est entierement pris sur le roc. Je fis a pied cette montee, pour examiner avec soin ces beaux rochers, _dignes de toute l'attention d'un amateur_.

"Les veines de ce granit forment en plusieurs endroits des _zigzags redoubles_, precisement comme ces anciennes tapisseries, connues sous le nom de points d'Hongrie; et la, on ne peut pas prononcer, si les veines de la pierre, sont ou ne sont pas paralleles a ses couches. Cependant ces veines reprennent aussi dans quelques places, une direction constante, et cette direction est bien la meme que celle des couches. Il paroit meme qu'en divers endroits, ou ces veines ont la forme d'un _sigma_ ou d'une M couchee M, ce sont les grandes jambes du _sigma_, qui ont la direction des couches. Enfin, j'observai plusieurs couches, qui dans le milieu de leur epaisseur paroissoient remplies de ces veines en zigzag, tandis qu'aupres de leurs bords, on les voyoit toutes en lignes droites."

Sec. 46. If the reader will now examine Turner's work at the point _x_ in the reference figure, and again on the stones in the foreground, comparing it finally with the fragment of the rocks which happened fortunately to come into my foreground in Plate +20+, rising towards the left, and of which I have etched the structure with some care, though at the time I had quite forgotten Saussure's notice of the peculiar M-shaped zigzags of the gneiss at the spot, I believe he will have enough evidence before him, taken all in all, to convince him of Turner's inevitable perception, and of the entire supremacy of his mountain drawing over all that had previously existed. And if he is able to refer, even to the engravings (though I desire always that what I state should be _tested_ by the drawings only) of any others of his elaborate hill-subjects, and will examine their details with careful reference to the laws explained in this chapter, he will find that the Turnerian promontories and banks are always simply _right_, and that in all respects; that their gradated curvatures, and nodding cliffs, and redundant sequence of folded glen and feathery glade, are, in all their seemingly fanciful beauty, literally the most downright plain speaking that has as yet been uttered about hills; and differ from all antecedent work, not in being ideal, but in being, so to speak, pictorial _casts_ of the ground. Such a drawing as that of the Yorkshire Richmond, looking down the river, in the England Series, is even better than a model of the ground, because it gives the aerial perspective, and is better than a photograph of the ground, because it exaggerates no shadows, while it unites the veracities both of model and photograph.

Sec. 47. Nor let it be thought that it was an easy or creditable thing to treat mountain ground with this faithfulness in the days when Turner executed those drawings. In the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1797), under article "Drawing," the following are the directions given for the production of a landscape:--

"If he is to draw a landscape from nature, let him take his station on a rising ground, where he will have a large horizon, and mark his tablet into three divisions, downwards from top to the bottom; and divide in his own mind the landscape he is to take into three divisions also. Then let him turn his face directly opposite to the midst of the horizon, keeping his body fixed, and draw what is directly before his eyes upon the middle division of the tablet: then _turn his head, but not his body_,[96] to the left hand and delineate what he views there, joining it properly to what he had done before; and, lastly, do the same by what is to be seen upon his right hand, laying down everything exactly, both with respect to distance and proportion. One example is given in plate clxviii.

"The best artists of late, in drawing their landscapes, make them shoot away, one part lower than another. Those who make their landscapes mount up higher and higher, as if they stood at the bottom of a hill to take the prospect, commit a great error; the best way is to get upon a rising ground, make the nearest objects in the piece the highest, and those that are farther off to shoot away lower and lower till they come almost level with the line of the horizon, lessening everything proportionably to its distance, and observing also to make the objects fainter and less distinct the farther they are removed from the eye. He must make all his lights and shades fall one way, and let every thing have its proper motion: as trees shaken by the wind, the small boughs bending more and the large ones less; water agitated by the wind, and dashing against ships or boats, or falling from a precipice upon rocks and stones, and spirting up again into the air, and sprinkling all about; clouds also in the air now gathered with the winds; now violently condensed into hail, rain, and the like,--always remembering, that whatever motions are caused by the wind must be made all to move the same way, because the wind can blow but one way at once."

Such was the state of the public mind, and of public instruction, at the time when Claude, Poussin, and Salvator were in the zenith of their reputation; such were the precepts which, even to the close of the century, it was necessary for a young painter to comply with during the best part of the years he gave to study. Take up one of Turner's views of our Yorkshire dells, seen from about a hawk's height of pause above the sweep of its river, and with it in your hand, side by side with the old Encyclopaedia paragraph, consider what must have been the man's strength, who, on a sudden, passed from such precept to such practice.

Sec. 48. On a sudden it was; for, even yet a youth, and retaining profound respect for all older artist's ways of _work_, he followed his own will fearlessly in choice of _scene_; and already in the earliest of his coast drawings there are as daring and strange decisions touching the site of the spectator as in his latest works; lookings down and up into coves and clouds, as defiant of all former theories touching possible perspective, or graceful componence of subject, as, a few years later, his system of color was of the theory of the brown tree. Nor was the step remarkable merely for its magnitude,--for the amount of progress made in a few years. It was much more notable by its direction. The discovery of the true structure of hill banks had to be made by Turner, not merely in _advance_ of the men of his day, but in _contradiction_ to them. Examine the works of contemporary and preceding landscapists, and it will be found that the universal practice is to make the tops of all cliffs broken and rugged, their bases smooth and soft, or concealed with wood. No one had ever observed the contrary structure, the bank rounded at the top, and broken on the flank. And yet all the hills of any importance which are met with throughout Lowland Europe are, properly speaking, high banks, for the most part following the courses of rivers, and forming a step from the high ground, of which the country generally consists, to the river level. Thus almost the whole of France, though, on the face of it, flat, is raised from 300 to 500 feet above the level of the sea, and is traversed by valleys either formed by, or directing, the course of its great rivers. In these valleys lie all its principal towns, surrounded, almost without exception, by ranges of hills covered with wood or vineyard. Ascending these hills, we find ourselves at once in an elevated plain, covered with corn and lines of apple trees, extending to the next river side, where we come to the brow of another hill, and descend to the city and valley beneath it. Our own valleys in Northumberland, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and Devonshire, are cut in the same manner through vast extents of elevated land; the scenery which interests the traveller chiefly, as he passes through even the most broken parts of those counties, being simply that of the high _banks_ which rise from the shores of the Dart or the Derwent, the Wharfe or the Tees. In all cases, when these banks are surmounted, the sensation is one of disappointment, as the adventurer finds himself, the moment he has left the edge of the ravine, in a waste of softly undulating moor or arable land, hardly deserving the title of hill country. As we advance into the upper districts the fact remains still the same, although the banks to be climbed are higher, the ravines grander, and the intermediate land more broken. The majesty of an isolated peak is still comparatively rare, and nearly all the most interesting pieces of scenery are glens or passes, which, if seen from a height great enough to command them in all their relations, would be found in reality little more than trenches excavated through broad masses of elevated land, and expanding at intervals into the wide basins which are occupied by the glittering lake or smiling plain.

Sec. 49. All these facts had been entirely ignored by artists; nay, almost by geologists, before Turner's time. He saw them at once; fathomed them to the uttermost, and, partly owing to early association, partly, perhaps, to the natural pleasure of working a new mine discovered by himself, devoted his best powers to their illustration, passing by with somewhat less attention the conditions of broken-summited rock, which had previously been the only ones known. And if we now look back to his treatment of the crest of Mont Pilate, in the figure given at the close of the last chapter, we shall understand better the nature and strength of the instinct which compelled him to sacrifice the peaked summit, and to bring the whole mountain within a lower enclosing line. In that figure, however, the dotted peak interferes with the perception of the form finally determined upon, which therefore I repeat here (Fig. 106), as Turner gave it in color. The eye may not at first detect the law of ascent in the peaks, but if the height of any one of them were altered, the general form would instantly be perceived to be less agreeable. Fig. 107 shows that they are disposed within an infinite curve, A _c_, from which the last crag falls a little to conceal the law, while the terminal line at the other extremity, A _b_, is a minor echo of the whole contour.

Sec. 50. I must pause to make one exception to my general statement that this structure had been entirely ignored. The reader was, perhaps, surprised by the importance I attached to the fragment of mountain background by Masaccio, given in Plate +13+ of the third volume. If he looks back to it now, his surprise will be less. It was a complete recognition of the laws of the lines of aqueous sculpture, asserted as Turner's was, in the boldest opposition to the principles of rock drawing of the time. It presents even smoother and broader masses than any which I have shown as types of hill form; but it must be remembered that Masaccio had seen only the softer contours of the Apennine limestone. I have no memorandum by me of the hill lines near Florence; but Plate +47+ shows the development of limestone structure, at a spot which has, I think, the best right to be given as an example of the Italian hills, the head of the valley of Carrara. The white scar on the hill side is the principal quarry; and the peaks above deserve observation, not so much for anything in their forms, as for the singular barrenness which was noted in the fifteenth chapter of the last volume (Sec. 8) as too often occurring in the Apennines. Compare this plate with the previous one. The peak drawn in Plate +46+ rises at least 7500 feet above the sea,--yet is wooded to its top; this Carrara crag not above 5000,[97]--yet it is wholly barren.

Sec. 51. Masaccio, however, as we saw, was taken away by death before he could give any one of his thoughts complete expression. Turner was spared to do _his_ work, in this respect at least, completely. It might be thought that, having had such adverse influence to struggle with, he would prevail against it but in part; and, though showing the way to much that was new, retain of necessity some old prejudices, and leave his successors to pursue in purer liberty, and with happier power, the path he had pointed out. But it was not so: he did the work so completely on the ground which he chose to illustrate, that nothing is left for future artists to accomplish in that kind. Some classes of scenery, as often pointed out in the preceding pages, he was unfamiliar with, or held in little affection, and out of that scenery, untouched by him, new motives may be obtained; but of such landscape as his favorite Yorkshire Wolds, and banks of Rhenish and French hill, and rocky mountains of Switzerland, like the St. Gothard, already so long dwelt upon, he has expressed the power in what I believe to be for ever a central and unmatchable way. I do not say this with positiveness, because it is not demonstrable. Turner may be beaten on his own ground--so may Tintoret, so may Shakespeare, Dante, or Homer: but my _belief_ is that all these first-rate men are lonely men; that the particular work they did was by them done for ever in the best way; and that this work done by Turner among the hills, joining the most intense appreciation of all tenderness with delight in all magnitude, and memory for all detail, is never to be rivalled, or looked upon in similitude again.

FOOTNOTES

[88] _Quantity_ of curvature is as measurable as quantity of
anything else; only observe that it depends on the nature of the
line, not on its magnitude; thus, in simple circular curvature, _a
b_, Fig. 96, being the fourth of a large circle, and _b c_ the half
of a smaller one, the quantity of the element of circular curvature
in the entire line _a c_ is three fourths of that in _any_
circle,--the the same as the quantity in the line _e f_.

[89] The catenary is not properly a curve capable of infinity, if
its direction does not alter with its length; but it is capable of
infinity, implying such alteration by the infinite removal of the
points of suspension. It entirely corresponds in its effect on the
eye and mind to the infinite curves. I do not know the exact nature
of the apparent curves of suspension formed by a high and weighty
waterfall; they are dependent on the gain in rapidity of descent by
the central current, where its greater body is less arrested by the
air; and I apprehend, are catenary in character, though not in
cause.

[90] I am afraid of becoming tiresome by going too far into the
intricacies of this most difficult subject; but I say "_towards_ the
bottom of the hill," because, when a certain degree of verticality
is reached, a counter protective influence begins to establish
itself, the stones and waterfalls bounding away from the brow of the
precipice into the air, and wearing it at the top only. Also it is
evident that when the curvature falls into a vertical cliff, as
often happens, the maximum of curvature must be somewhere _above_
the brow of the cliff, as in the cliff itself it has again died into
a straight line.

[91] The following extract from my private diary, giving an account
of the destruction of the beauty of this waterfall in the year 1849,
which I happened to witness, may be interesting to those travellers
who remember it before that period. The house spoken of as
"Joseph's," is that of the guide Joseph Coutet, in a village about a
mile below the cascade, between it and the Arve: that noticed as of
the "old avalanche" is a hollow in the forest, cleft by a great
avalanche which fell from the Aiguille du Midi in the spring of
1844. It struck down about a thousand full-grown pines, and left an
open track in the midst of the wood, from the cascade nearly down to
the village.

"Evening, Thursday, June 28th. I set out for the Cascade des
Pelerins as usual; when we reached Joseph's house, we heard a sound
from the torrent like low thunder, or like that of a more distant
and heavier fall. A peasant said something to Joseph, who stopped to
listen, then nodded, and said to me, 'La cascade vient de se
deborder.' Thinking there would be time enough afterwards to ask for
explanations, I pushed up the hill almost without asking a question.
When we reached the place of the old avalanche, Joseph called to me
to stop and see the torrent increase. There was at this time a dark
cloud on the Aiguille du Midi, down to its base; the upper part of
the torrent was brown, the lower white, not larger than usual. The
brown part came down, I thought, with exceeding slowness, reaching
the cascade gradually; as it did so, the fall rose to about once and
a half its usual height, and in the five minutes' time that I paused
(it could not be more) turned to the color of slate. I then pushed
on as hard as I could. When I reached the last ascent I was obliged
to stop for breath, but got up before the fall could sensibly have
diminished in body of water. It was then nearly twice as far cast
out from the rock as last night, and the water nearly black in
color; and it had the appearance, as it broke and separated at the
outer part of the fall, of a shower of fragments of flat slate. The
reason of this appearance I could not comprehend, unless the water
was so mixed with mud that it drew out flat and unctuously when it
broke; but so it was: instead of spray it looked like a shower of
dirty flat bits of slate--only with a lustre, as if they had been
wet first. This, however, was the least of it, for the torrent
carried with it nearly as much weight of stone as water; the stones
varying in size, the average being, I suppose, about that of a hen's
egg; but I do not suppose that at any instant the arch of water was
without four or five as large as a man's fist, and often came larger
ones,--all vomited forth with the explosive power of a small
volcano, and falling in a continual shower as thick, constant, and,
had it not been mixed with the crash of the fall, as loud as a heavy
fire of infantry; they bounded and leaped in the basin of the fall
like hailstones in a thunder-shower. As we watched the fall it
seemed convulsively to diminish, and suddenly showed, as it
shortened, the rock underneath it, which I could hardly see
yesterday: as I cried out to Joseph it rose again, higher than ever,
and continued to rise, till it all but reached the snow on the rock
opposite. It then became very fantastic and variable, increasing and
diminishing in the space of two or three seconds, and partially
changing its direction. After watching it for half an hour or so, I
determined to try and make some memoranda. Coutet brought me up a
jug of water: I stooped to dip my brush, when Coutet caught my arm,
saying, 'Tenez;' at the same instant I heard a blow, like the going
off of a heavy gun, two or three miles away; I looked up, and as I
did, the cascade sank before my eyes, and fell back to the rock.
Neither of us spoke for an instant or two; then Coutet said, 'C'est
une pierre, qui est logee dans le creux,' or words to that effect:
in fact, he had seen the stone come down as he called to me. I
thought also that nothing more had happened, and watched the
destroyed fall only with interest, until, as suddenly as it had
fallen, it rose again, though not to its former height; and Coutet,
stooping down, exclaimed, 'Ce n'est pas ca, le roc est perce;' in
effect, a hole was now distinctly visible in the cup which turned
the stream, through which the water whizzed as from a burst pipe.
The cascade, however, continued to increase, until this new channel
was concealed, and I was maintaining to Coutet that he must have
been mistaken (and that the water only _struck_ on the outer rock,
having changed its mode of fall above), when again it fell; and the
two girls, who had come up from the chalet, expressed their opinion
at once, that the 'cascade est finie.' This time all was plain; the
water gushed in a violent jet d'eau through the new aperture, hardly
any of it escaping above. It rose again gradually, as the hole was
choked with stones, and again fell; but presently sprang out almost
to its first elevation (the water being by this time in much less
body), and retained very nearly the form it had yesterday, until I
got tired of looking at it, and went down to the little chalet, and
sat down before its door. I had not been there five minutes before
the cascade fell, and rose no more."

[92] It might be thought at first that the line to which such curves
would approximate would be the cycloid, as the line of quickest
descent. But in reality the contour is modified by perpetual sliding
of the debris under the influence of rain; and by the bounding of
detached fragments with continually increased momentum. I was quite
unable to get at anything like the expression of a constant law
among the examples I studied in the Alps, except only the great laws
of delicacy and changefulness in all curves whatsoever.

[93] I owe Mr. Le Keux sincere thanks, and not a little admiration,
for the care and skill with which he has followed, on a much reduced
scale, the detail of this drawing.

[94] Allow ten feet square for average space to each pine; suppose
the valley seen only for five miles of its length, and the pine
district two miles broad on each side--a low estimate of breadth
also: this would give five millions.

[95] The white spots on the brow of the little cliff are lichens,
only four or five inches broad.

[96] What a _comfortable_, as well as intelligent, operation,
sketching from nature must have been in those days!

[97] It is not one of the highest points of the Carrara chain. The
chief summits are much more jagged, and very noble. See Chap. XX. Sec.
20.