Last summer I was sailing up the coast of Norway, between the islands and the mainland, towards Bergen. On the outer side were miles of naked rocks, rising, so far as I can recollect, to perhaps six or eight hundred feet above the sea. Their glaciation, marked by their curved and ice-worn outlines, was as distinct as in a diagram. They were traversed by upright planes of jointing laid as closely -so it seemed in the distance-as they could have been drawn by a fine pen. The whole rock had the appearance of having been cut straight downwards into thin slices, and then carefully put together again in such a manner that you could still see the joinings traced in dark lines-for it was a dull day-as if by the ink of the etching-pen. The planes of stratification or foliation were perfectly defined, marking the rock into slabs laid sloping towards the mainland, and shelving to the sea like artificial embankments of stone, up which the waves were sliding. It was a remarkable geological diagram.

It was singular, but it was the mere skeleton of landscape. Its lines were those of a ground plan or elevation; their intersections were like those of a scaffolding. There can have been few on board the steamer who did not turn with pleasure to the other side of the ship. There, on the mainland, the atmosphere was such that the structure seemed to be defined by comparatively few lines, — but they were master lines: hills rose behind hills, and towered into mountains; there were snow-gleams from misty heights, amid a whole world of chiaroscuro; and in the foreground lay the naked rocks and the changeful sea. The one was an excellent

geological model upon the natural scale, the other was mere "mountain truth" expressed in the highest spirit of art. Yet I venture to think that the one would greatly help in the interpretation of the other; and for a very obvious reason the one was constructed, so to speak, upon the lines of the other. The one was anatomy, the other was the living presence; the one was the skeleton, the other was body and soul.1

1 I am not unmindful that there must be many things which appear differently to the eye of the artist and the eye of the geologist. The eye sees what it brings with it the power of seeing, and, it may be added, the proclivity to see. Passing through some of our Highland valleys, for instance, the geologist may be tempted to regard the morainic mounds, with which they are sometimes for miles bestrewn, with a certain impatience, as little better than mere geological litter. They are, in truth, in one sense only a sort of rubbish-heaps left behind by the glaciers of the Ice Age. They are often the most irregular mounds, thrown into groups as waggon-loads may be shot into heaps, with but little beauty in their short curves and little colour in their spare cleading of sombre heather; the arid subsoil breaking through the thin peat, and the peat mingling with it like grime.

But if you will accept her leading, Nature will not allow you lightly to esteem anything of hers as litter. You have been following the stream downwards. The hummocks, the moraine mounds, which the inevitable eye of the poet so long ago saw to be

"Hillocks dropped in Nature's careless haste,"

before there was a science capable of investigating them, have become dappled with birchen shaws and covered with the feathery juniper, with its sprays of waxen green; the loose stones, half buried in bushes, are hieroglyphed over with moss. See these green knolls of exquisite sylvan loveliness, where the ferns wave by day and the fairies dance by night! See these deep hollow coverts underneath the flaky foliage, where the mavis sings to his mate! Nature, once again, will not allow you to dismiss any of her works with contempt as mere rubbish-heaps. You have climbed to the crown of some higher knoll, and you cast your eye back at the moraines of the upper valley. And lo! they too have been transformed. A haze has fallen over them, and a cloud rests above the

There is only one other aspect of the general relation of science to landscape - painting which I need refer to here. I find that Mr Hamerton, the well-known editor of the Portfolio,' distinctly admits that science has its own proper place in the training of the artist. The efficiency of the artist, he says, depends in a great measure on his vivid recollection of form and effect; and, by assisting the memory to retain these with a precision not otherwise attainable, science is of the same sort of use to him that the map is to the traveller when it informs him where the places lie, when it guards him against mistakes, and assists his topographical memory.1 And again, it is to the artist what the rules of grammar are to the writer.2 This is true, so far as it goes, and true especially of the sciences which Mr Hamerton names—i.e., perspective, optics, and anatomy. But there is a much deeper truth beyond it. Science may become much more to the artist than mere chart or mere grammar; it may be to him what knowledge is to the understanding, reasoning, mind-something that may exercise, vivify, and fertilise his mind every conscious moment, lending to the eye a deeper insight and a more "precious seeing." It may seem to stand aside in the supreme moments of creative activity, but it is even then scarcely more separable from haze, and a shaft of sunlight falls through the cloud. Their own outlines are as black as jet. Where there seemed to you before to be only meanness, there is now mystery; and what seemed scarcely worth a glance from the geologist, is now a subject for the reverent study of the artist. Nature has asserted herself as the Supreme of Art.

1 P. G. Hamerton, 'Thoughts about Art,' p. 357.

2 Ibid., Portfolio Papers.

him than his own powers of reason.

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Nor is exact truth at war with poetry,—and here I return to the point with which I started. Poetry," says Wordsworth, "is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression in the face of all science." If he be not endowed with any large measure of that "finer spirit," the artist who sits close to Nature's feet, and who knows her ways, will at least be a correct topographer, or a faithful naturalist; his love of nature may even shed over him a something hard to distinguish from genius itself. But if he possess that spirit, that greatest of endowments, he will, like Tennyson and Browning, the great scientific poets of the age, stand upon the supreme attainable altitude of the vantage-ground of truth, from which alone he can. command all the visible horizon, ascending, as if at will, to the purest heights, or revelling amid the gloom and the cross-lights of the most shadowy recesses.1

Perhaps the best commentary on the relation of science to landscape-painting is to be found in the works of artists themselves,-in those studies the science of which-I now refer exclusively to geology -is so simple that ordinary faithful observation and good common-sense can take its place. I turn, for instance, to Mr H. W. B. Davis's picture in this year's Academy, "The Picardy Dunes." It is an excellent example of faithful delineation of the topographical" kind. Every hollow, almost every dimple, among these low sand-hills tells of wind and. blinding drift-as the snow-wreaths do after a winter's storm, or like the waves of the open ocean 1 See Appendix III., Science and the Poets.

when the wind has gone down and the sea heaves under a quiet sky. It is now calm. The lie of the bent will tell you from what direction the wind came: you can almost fancy you detect those broken stalks that whirl round and round in the breeze, describing circles on the sand. The rabbit-burrows will tell you that the wind has not been violent; they will be buried out of sight in the next gale, like the track which the sheep are leaving. Yet the picture is not suggestive only of aridity and of blinding blasts of dry sand. The sheep can find pasture, and have milk for their lambs. There are trees which suggest the neighbourhood and the hand of man; they will remind you of the Pinus maritimus, which has checked. the march of the sand over many a league of southern France, causing the sandbanks to be clothed with evergreen woods, and the surface of the sand itself with softest mosses. Many of these things may have been in the mind of the artist; to me his picture is eloquent of them. He has certainly studied very carefully the geology, in its widest sense (i.e., I believe, its artistic sense), of the sanddunes.

I turn to another picture, and this, as it happens, is also by Mr Davis 1-his pleasing study, "A Placid Morning on the Wye." It leads us away to a spot where a few stones lie across the stream, almost like a natural weir, or a place which you would choose to lay with stepping-stones. The quiet river, bearing almost unbroken the reflections of cattle that are

1 I regret that I have described two pictures from the same hand. I chose them not altogether from their merits-considerable as these are-but as illustrations.