as regards the present. In the one case his language was, I believe, as intentionally, as it was for the most part actually, obscure. It was, in fact, a sort of reddening of the eastern sky before the event, giving its sensible character, but withholding, more or less, its very image. In the other case, the prophet's words were clear enough: they were for a practical purpose; they had therefore all practical distinctness. Let us apply this to the case before us.

"He has dwelt and communed with Nature all the days of his life; he knows her now too well; he cannot palter over the material littlenesses of her outward form; he must give her soul, or he has done nothing, and he cannot do this with the flax, the earth, and the oil." (Ibid. § 8.)

If this burning language has any meaning, what a pass are we come to? It was hard enough that the prophet gave "but one picture to one truth;" that

Llanthony" reveals a rain cloud the moment after it has immortalised "Jumieges." Hard enough to think of pilgrimage after pilgrimage; one burning syllable in this county, the connecting one some hundred miles further: how shall we "burst in ignorance " if, having supposed that the subject of revelation was the material universe, and its organ the painter's pallet, it turns out that the prophet "never aims at sensual impressions," and that he cannot do his errand with the "flax, the earth, and the oil!" Nay, if, after having sat through a painful trial of Claude and others, the reiterated charge being that they "denied" the circumstantial truths so circumstantially brought to light by the prophet,—we find that

"he cannot palter over the material littlenesses of nature." Such sublimity after such a process is like the fastidiousness of mysterious Junius, who, existing only in the "Morning Advertiser," "cannot condescend to an altercation in the Newspapers."

Even this is not the worst of it. Instead of aiming at "sensual impressions," Turner aims at final truths, which "only experience can recognise ; " every new insight into the works of God giving us an "interpretation to something in Turner's works: " in point of fact, there is absolutely "nothing in Turner, not one dot nor line, whose meaning can be understood without previous knowledge." What a marvellous exhibition of the prophetic office! How do wonders grow as we get on! The prophet's works are a revelation. But they require themselves to be revealed! And they must be revealed by the very knowledge revelation has to communicate! In simple truth, to receive the prophet's message we must first be prophets ourselves. It is not Joseph Mallord William Turner, of Maiden Lane, who is to reveal the material universe; but the material universe that is to reveal Joseph Mallord William Turner, of Maiden Lane!

It seems that prophecy also is among the things that Pre-Raffaellitism is to revolutionise.

E

50

CHAP. VII.

THE TURNER CONTROVERSY CONTINUED.-SCIENCE AND ART.

WE proceed with our defensive inquiry. Mr. Ruskin tells us,

"So when I see things in the foreground of Salvator of which I cannot pronounce whether they be granite, or slate, or tufa, I affirm that there is in them neither harmonious combination, nor simple effect, but simple monstrosity." (Preface to the Second Edition of Modern Painters, p. xxxi.)

I take these words as the subject of the present chapter: and have no possible hesitation in asserting that, not in Salvator only, but in actual nature, it is not as "granite, or slate, or tufa," but a something altogether irrespective of such discrimination, that a rock or a mountain affects what I may call our landscape senses and landscape feelings; that the great mother elements of sublimity, beauty, or whatsoever else awes, soothes, or otherwise affects us, have really nothing to do with those scientific "truths” Mr. Ruskin here insists on. I could quote from every master of poetry, who has sung, in every age, of natural scenery,-from "Milton, Dryden, Pope," down to "Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey; and especially from that Beethoven of poetry from whom I take the classification, and show that, in all

SCIENTIFIC TRUTHS-LANDSCAPE FEELINGS. 51

their thrilling passages, there is not an image nor an allusion that involves the remotest consciousness of such things as are here demanded. But I have quoted enough; I am about to appeal to experience; and I know not why I should scruple, in all frankness, to produce my own.

It is now some years since I first visited Switzerland. We travelled by post through Paris, and had therefore many of what some call weary miles ere we reached the borders of the mountain land. Never can I forget my intense thirst for the first distant sight of Mont Blanc; the almost childlike gaze, day after day, upon the horizon; the disappointment at Dijon; the disappointment at Dole; the resignation as we neared the intervening ramparts of France and Switzerland; the alternate ascending and descending; the burial, for a night's halt, within the interminable recesses of the Jura; the long emergence; the fitful expectation; the mockery of hope; the reiterated winding round barren summits and shelving abysses; the plunging into forests; the re-ascent; the sudden pause, with the direction to "descend” and follow a little pathway; and, the stupendous vision our eyes had ached for!

There lay, a thousand fathoms down, the whole cantons of Geneva and the Pays de Vaud; with all their countless towns, villages, and hamlets, laughing in the joyous sunshine. There, stretched along its twenty leagues of azure, the calm lake of poetic, chivalric, and historic fame. There rose the reverend towers of the grey old City of the Reformers. There, beyond, the unnumbered peaks of Savoy,

"in all the pomp of mountain majesty." There, flinging on them its magic mantle of light and shade, played a fantastic wreath of tissuey cloud. And there, in its own world of unapproachable purity, was the Mont Blanc of all our day-dreams. We spoke not then of "slate, granite, or tufa." We spoke of nothing. We looked on the scene beneath: we looked in each other's eyes; there was the tear of delicious awe; but there was not a moment's thought of " the truths” of science.

I could multiply such facts: each as much a "truth" as any Mr. Ruskin finds in Turner, and wants in Claude. I remember how we spent a Sunday at Chamounix; and how, circumstances preventing my holding our Church Service, as was my wont, we took our Liturgy beneath a pine forest; how we got on without distraction as far as to the "Te Deum;" and how, when we came to "Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of Thy glory," we lifted upwards, at the same moment, an involuntary mutual look. for, on one side was Mont Blanc, with his eternal glaciers above our head; and on the other his brother Brevent, making deep articulate response. It will not be asked what said "slate or tufa" at such a moment.

me.

Remembrances crowd on I recollect my ascent of the Montanvert: how I asked my guide if he did not encounter sometimes a specimen of the unhappy class the Psalmist calls "the foolish body," who talk of all these wonders as coming from something they deify by the name of "chance ;" and how the noble Savoyard replied at once, "I've heard