Part 2 (1/2)

38 Whenever you find Turner stopping short, or apparently failing in this way, especially when he does the contrary of what any of us would have been nearly sure to do, then is the time to look for your main lesson froest of all Shakespeare's heroes, when any one else would have had his sword out in an instant:

”Keep up your bright swords, for the deill rust theht, I should have known it Without a prompter”[8]

[Footnote 8: ”Othello,” I 2]

Now you must alatch keenly what Turner's _cue_ is You will see his hand go to his hilt fast enough, when it coh, it is true; but the virtue of the whole scene, and , is not in the masonry of it There is much better masonry and much more wonderful ruin of it elsewhere; Duo under one of the arches of buildings such as there are in the world Look at what Turner will do when his cue isis you lass at the ivy and battlements in this, when, also, his cue isone pebble or joint in the walls of Du out the other day, to a friend in Aroup of the _Liber Studiorum_ to form a nucleus for an art collection at Boston And I warned ainst the sore disappointht of these so much celebrated works would be to them ”You will have to make them understand,” I wrote to hi not what Turner has done, but what he has not done These are not finished pictures, but studies; endeavors, that is to say, to get the utmost result possible with the sihtful, and have each their fixed purpose, to which everything else is sacrificed; and that purpose is always i, not at its outside”

40 Now, it is true, there are beautiful lichens at Blair Athol, and good building at Duions of the world, and there is fararchitecture in other countries than in Scotland The essential character of Scotland is that of a wild and thinly inhabited rocky country, not subliht strea trees This wild land possesses a subdued and iic feudal, pastoral, and civic history And in the events of that history a deep tenderness of sentiidity of habitual character, accurately corresponding to the conditions of climate and earth

41 Noant you especially to notice, with respect to these things, Turner's introduction of the ugly square tower high up on the left

Your first instinct would be to exclaim, ”How unlucky that was there at all! Why, at least, could not Turner have kept it out of sight?” He has quite gratuitously brought it into sight; gratuitously drawn firmly the three lines of stiff drip-stone which mark its squareness and blankness It is precisely that blank vacancy of decoration, and setting of the ainst wind and hich he wants to force on your notice, that he hly out of Italy and Greece, and put you wholly into a barbarous and frost-hardened land; that once having its gloom defined he may show you all the more intensely what pastoral purity and innocence of life, and loveliness of nature, are underneath the banks and braes of Doune, and by every brooklet that feeds the Forth and Clyde

That is the main purpose of these two studies How it is obtained by various incidents in the drawing of stones, and trees, and figures, I will show you another time The chief element in both is the sadness and depth of their effect of subdued though clear light in sky and stream

42 The sadness of their effect, I repeat If you reh last year, youaccustomed to my definition of the Greek school in art, as one essentially Chiaroscurist, as opposed to Gothic color; Realist, as opposed to Gothic i, as opposed to Gothic hope And you are prepared to recognize it by any one of these three conditions Only, observe, the chiaroscuro is simply the technical result of the two others: a Greek painter likes light and shade, first, because they enable him to realize forht and shade are ay

So that the defect of color, and substitution of radation, constantly express the two characters: first, Academic or Greek fleshliness and solidity as opposed to Gothic ilooreat French rooeneral character of the historical pictures, you will instantly recognize, in thinking generally of the, the gray or greenish and brownish color, or defect of color, lurid and looe, the Field of Eylau, the Starvation on the Raft, and the Death of Endymion; always melancholy, and usually horrible

The more recent pictures of the painter Geroree; above all, the fleshliness and ether inadmissible into the rank of the fine arts

44 Now you observe that I never speak of this Greek school but with a certain dread And yet I have told you that Turner belongs to it, that all the strongestto it; but then, re of the Acadeinal power, in Velasquez, in titian, or in Reynolds; but the whole world of art is full of a base learning of the Acadeue of fools

And again, a stern and more or less hopeless reatest es,--of Homer, Aeschylus, Pindar, or Shakespeare But an earthy, sensual, and weak despondency is the attribute of the lowest mental and bodily disease; and the imbecilities and lassitudes which follow crime, both in nations and individuals, can only find a last sti sensation in the fascinated contehest, and these--the basest, you have every variety and coth and ofthemselves always between the two oppositely and equally erroneous faiths, that genius enius Of the two, there is er in the first than in the second s without knowledge and without discipline

But all the learning of the Academies has never yet drawn so much as one fair face, or ever set two pleasant colors side by side

46 Now there is one great Northern painter, of whom I have not spoken till now, probably to your surprise, Rubens; whose power is composed of so many elements, and whose character may be illustrated so completely, and with it the various operation of the counter schools, by one of his pictures now open to your study, that I would press you to set aside one of your brightest Easter afternoons for the study of that one picture in the Exhibition of Old Masters, the so-called ”Juno and Argus,” No 387

So-called, I say; for it is not a picture either of Argus or of Juno, but the portrait of a Flemish lady ”as Juno” (just as Rubens painted his fain” and hiood anatous In the days of Rubens, you ht of as a inal us is the night, or that his eyes are stars; but with the absolutely literal and brutal part of his Dutch nature supposes the head of Argus full of real eyes all over, and represents Hebe cutting the one into the hand of the Goddess, like an unseemly oyster

That conception of the action, and the loathsous under the chariot, are the essential contributions of Rubens' own Netherland personality Then the rest of the treatment he learned from other schools, but adopted with splendid power

47 First, I think, you ought to be struck by having two large peacocks painted with scarcely any color in thereen, peacocks Now you know that Rubens is always spoken of as a great colorist, _par excellence_ a colorist; and would you not have expected that--before all things--the first thing he would have seen in a peacock would have been gold and blue? He sees nothing of the kind A peacock, to hi of the neck, cloud-like in the toss and wave of its plunificent drawing; he has not given you one bright gleareen or purple in all the two birds

Well, the reason of that is that Rubens is not _par excellence_ a colorist; nay, is not even a good colorist He is a very second-rate and coarse colorist; and therefore his color catches the lower public, and gets talked about But he is _par excellence_ a splendid draughtsman of the Greek school; and no one else, except Tintoret, could have draith the same ease either the muscles of the dead body or the plureat colorist does not mean that he could not, had he chosen He arped froht in coarse and violent for, and in torift in him, if the flesh had not subdued it There is one part of this picture which he learned how to do at Venice, the Iris, with the golden hair, in the chariot behind Juno In her he has put out his full power, under the teaching of Veronese and titian; and he has all the splendid Northern-Gothic, Reynolds or Gainsborough play of feature with Venetian color Scarcely anything more beautiful than that head, or more masterly than the composition of it, with the inlaid pattern of Juno's robe below, exists in the art of any country _Si sic ohout the entire works of Rubens

49 See, then, how the picture divides itself In the fleshly baseness, brutality and stupidity of its main conception, is the Dutch part of it; that is Rubens' own In the noble drawing of the dead body and of the birds you have the Phidias-Greek part of it, brought down to Rubens through Michael Angelo In the embroidery of Juno's robe you have the Daedalus-Greek part of it, brought down to Rubens through Veronese In the head of Iris you have the pure Northern-Gothic part of it, brought down to Rubens through Giorgione and titian

50 Now, though--even if we had given ten ression--the lessons in this picture would have been orth it, I have not, in taking you to it, gone out of my oay There is a special point for us to observe in those dark peacocks If you look at the notes on the Venetian pictures in the end of my ”Stones of Venice,” you will find it especially dwelt upon as singular that Tintoret, in his picture of ”The Nativity,” has a peacock without any color in it And the reason of it is also that Tintoret belongs, with the full half of his mind, as Rubens does, to the Greek school But the two ins hat Venice taught hiins with Athens, and adopts from Venice Now if you will look back to my fifth Lecture[9] you will find it said that the colorists can always adopt as much chiaroscuro as suits them, and so become perfect; but the chiaroscurists cannot, on their part, adopt color, except partially

And accordingly, whenever Tintoret chooses, he can laugh Rubens to scorn in ht and shade; but Rubens only here and there--as far as I know ione in color

[Footnote 9: ”Lectures on Art” (the Inaugural Course, 1870), -- 138]