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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Harbours of England, by John Ruskin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Harbours of England
+
+Author: John Ruskin
+
+Illustrator: J. M. W. Turner
+
+Release Date: May 23, 2007 [EBook #21591]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HARBOURS OF ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, LN Yaddanapudi and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Library Edition
+
+THE COMPLETE WORKS
+OF
+JOHN RUSKIN
+
+STONES OF VENICE
+VOLUME III
+
+GIOTTO
+LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
+HARBOURS OF ENGLAND
+A JOY FOREVER
+
+NATIONAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
+NEW YORK CHICAGO
+
+
+
+
+THE COMPLETE WORKS
+OF
+JOHN RUSKIN
+
+VOLUME X
+
+GIOTTO AND HIS WORKS
+LECTURES ON ARCHITECTURE
+THE HARBORS OF ENGLAND
+POLITICAL ECONOMY OF ART
+(A JOY FOREVER)
+
+
+
+
+THE HARBORS OF ENGLAND.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+                           PAGE
+   THE HARBORS OF ENGLAND    1
+      I. DOVER              34
+     II. RAMSGATE           36
+    III. PLYMOUTH           38
+     IV. CATWATER           40
+      V. SHEERNESS          41
+     VI. MARGATE            43
+    VII. PORTSMOUTH         46
+   VIII. FALMOUTH           49
+     IX. SIDMOUTH           51
+      X. WHITBY             52
+     XI. DEAL               54
+    XII. SCARBOROUGH        56
+
+
+
+
+EDITOR'S PREFACE.
+
+
+"Turner's _Harbors of England_," as it is generally called, is a book
+which, for various reasons, has never received from readers of Mr.
+Ruskin's writings the attention it deserves. True, it has always been
+sought after by connoisseurs, and collectors never fail with their
+eleven or twelve guineas whenever a set of Artist's Proofs of the First
+Edition of 1856 comes into the market. But to the General Reader the
+book with its twelve exquisitely delicate mezzotints--four of which Mr.
+Ruskin has declared to be among the very finest executed by Turner from
+his marine subjects--is practically unknown.
+
+The primary reason for this neglect is not far to seek. Since 1877 no
+new edition of the work has been published, and thus it has gradually
+passed from public knowledge, though still regarded with lively interest
+by those to whom Mr. Ruskin's words--particularly words written in
+further unfolding of the subtleties of Turner's art--at all times appeal
+so strongly.
+
+In his own preface Mr. Ruskin has told us all that in 1856 it was
+necessary to know of the genesis of the _Harbors_. That account may now
+be supplemented with the following additional facts. In 1826 Turner (in
+conjunction with Lupton, the engraver) projected and commenced a serial
+publication entitled _The Ports of England_. But both artist and
+engraver lacked the opportunity required to carry the undertaking to a
+successful conclusion, and three numbers only were completed. Each of
+these contained two engravings. Part I., introducing _Scarborough_ and
+_Whitby_, duly appeared in 1826; Part II., with _Dover_ and _Ramsgate_,
+in 1827; and in 1828 Part III., containing _Sheerness_ and
+_Portsmouth_, closed the series.[A] Twenty-eight years afterwards (that
+is, in 1856, five years after Turner's death) these six plates, together
+with six new ones, were published by Messrs. E. Gambart & Co., at whose
+invitation Mr. Ruskin consented to write the essay on Turner's marine
+painting which accompanied them. The book, a handsome folio, appears to
+have been immediately successful, for in the following year a second
+edition was called for. This was a precise reprint of the 1856 edition;
+but, unhappily, the delicate plates already began to exhibit signs of
+wear. The copyright (which had not been retained by Mr. Ruskin, but
+remained the property of Messrs. E. Gambart & Co.) then passed to
+Messrs. Day & Son, who, after producing the third edition of 1859, in
+turn disposed of it to Mr. T. J. Allman. Allman issued a fourth edition
+in 1872, and then parted with his rights to Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.,
+who in 1877 brought out the fifth, and, until now, last edition. Since
+that date the work has been out of print, and has remained practically
+inaccessible to the ordinary reader.
+
+    [A] To ornament the covers of these parts, Turner designed a
+    vignette, which was printed upon the center of the front wrapper of
+    each. As _The Ports of England_ is an exceptionally scarce book, and
+    as the vignette can be obtained in no other form, a facsimile of it
+    is here given. The original drawing was presented by Mr. Ruskin to
+    the Fitz-William Museum, at Cambridge, where it may now be seen.
+
+It is matter for congratulation that at length means have been found to
+bring _The Harbors of England_ once more into currency, and to issue the
+book through Mr. George Allen at a price which will place it within the
+reach of the reading public at large.
+
+The last edition of 1877, with its worn and "retouched" plates,[B] was
+published at twenty-five shillings; less than a third of that sum will
+suffice to procure a copy of this new issue in which the prints (save
+for their reduced size) more nearly approach the clearness and beauty of
+the originals of 1856 than any of the three editions which have
+immediately preceded it.
+
+    [B] By this time (1877) the plates had become considerably worn, and
+    were accordingly "retouched" by Mr. Chas. A. Tomkins. But such
+    retouching proved worse than useless. The delicacy of the finer work
+    had entirely vanished, and the plates remained but a ghost of their
+    former selves, such as no one would recognize as doing justice to
+    Turner. The fifth is unquestionably the least satisfactory of the
+    five original editions containing Lupton's engravings.
+
+I have before me the following interesting letter addressed by Mr.
+Ruskin's father to Mr. W. Smith Williams, for many years literary
+adviser to Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.:--
+
+     "CHAMOUNI, _August 4th, 1856._
+
+     "MY DEAR SIR,--I hear that in _The Athenaeum_ of 26th July there is
+     a good article on my son's _Harbors of England_, and I should be
+     greatly obliged by Mr. Gordon Smith sending me that number....
+
+     "The history of this book, I believe, I told you. Gambart, the
+     French publisher and picture dealer, said some 18 months ago that
+     he was going to put out 12 Turner plates, never published, of
+     English Harbors, and he would give my son two good Turner drawings
+     for a few pages of text to illustrate them.[C] John agreed, and
+     wrote the text, when poorly in the spring of 1855, at Tunbridge
+     Wells; and it seems the work has just come out. It was in my
+     opinion an extremely well done thing, and more likely, as far as it
+     went, if not to be extremely popular, at least to be received
+     without cavil than anything he had written. If there is a very
+     favorable review in _The Athenaeum_ ... it may tend to disarm the
+     critics, and partly influence opinion of his larger works....--With
+     our united kind regards,
+
+     "Yours very truly,
+     "JOHN JAMES RUSKIN."
+
+    [C] Mr. E. Gambart (who is still living) states that, to the best of
+    his recollection, he paid Mr. Ruskin 150 guineas for his work.
+    Probably this was the price originally agreed upon, the two Turner
+    drawings being ultimately accepted as a more welcome and appropriate
+    form of remuneration.
+
+In all save one particular the Text here given follows precisely that of
+the previous issues. It has been the good fortune of the present Editor
+to be able to restore a characteristic passage suppressed from motives
+of prudence when the work was originally planned.[D] The proof-sheets of
+the first edition, worked upon by Mr. Ruskin, were given by him to his
+old nurse Anne.[E] She, fortunately, carefully preserved them, and in
+turn gave them to Mr. Allen, some ten years before he became Mr.
+Ruskin's publisher. These proofs had been submitted as they came from
+the press to Mr. W. H. Harrison (well known to readers of _On the Old
+Road_, etc., as "My First Editor"), who marked them freely with notes
+and suggestions. To one passage he appears to have taken so decided an
+objection that its author was prevailed upon to delete it. But, whilst
+deferring thus to the judgment of others, and consenting to remove a
+sentence which he doubtless regarded with particular satisfaction as
+expressing a decided opinion upon a favorite picture, Mr. Ruskin
+indulged in one of those pleasantries which now and again we observe in
+his informal letters, though seldom, if ever, in his serious writings.
+In the margin, below the canceled passage, he wrote boldly: "_Sacrificed
+to the Muse of Prudence. J. R._"[F]
+
+    [D] See _post_, p. 19.
+
+    [E] See _Praeterita_. She died March 30th, 1871.
+
+    [F] The accompanying illustration is a facsimile of the portion of
+    the proof-sheet described above--slightly reduced to fit the smaller
+    page.
+
+That Mr. Harrison was justified in raising objection to this "moderate
+estimate" of Turner's picture will, I think, be readily allowed. In
+those days Mr. Ruskin's influence was, comparatively speaking, small;
+and the expression of an opinion which heaped praise upon the single
+painting of a partially understood painter at the expense of a great and
+popular institution would only have served to arouse opposition, and
+possibly to attract ridicule. It is different to-day. We know the keen
+enthusiasm of the author of _The Seven Lamps_, and have seen again and
+again how he expresses himself in terms of somewhat exaggerated
+admiration when writing of a painter whom he appreciates, or a picture
+that he loves. To us this enthusiasm is an attractive characteristic. It
+has never been permitted to distort the vision or cloud the critical
+faculty; and we follow the teaching of the Master all the more closely
+because we feel his fervor, and know how completely he becomes possessed
+with a subject which appeals to his imagination or his heart. I have
+therefore not scrupled to revive the words which he consented to
+immolate at the shrine of Prudence.
+
+It is not my province here to enter into any criticism of the pages
+which follow; but, for the benefit of those who are not versed in the
+minutiae of Shelleyan topics, a word may be said regarding Mr. Ruskin's
+reference[G] to the poet who met his death in the Bay of Spezzia. The
+_Don Juan_ was no "traitorous" craft. Fuller and more authentic
+information is to hand now than the meager facts at the disposal of a
+writer in 1856; and we know that the greed of man, and not the lack of
+sea-worthiness in his tiny vessel, caused Percy Shelley to
+
+         "... Suffer a sea change
+    Into something rich and strange."
+
+    [G] See _post_, p. 3.
+
+There is, unhappily, no longer any room for doubt that the _Don Juan_
+was willfully run down by a felucca whose crew coveted the considerable
+sum of money they believed Byron to have placed on board, and cared
+nothing for the sacrifice of human life in their eagerness to seize the
+gold.
+
+The twelve engravings, to which reference has already been made, have
+been reproduced by the photogravure process from a selected set of early
+examples; and, in addition, the plates so prepared have been carefully
+worked upon by Mr. Allen himself. It will thus be apparent that
+everything possible has been done to produce a worthy edition of a
+worthy book, and to place in the hands of the public what to the present
+generation of readers is tantamount to a new work from a pen
+which--alas!--has now for so long a time been still.
+
+THOMAS J. WISE.
+
+
+
+
+AUTHOR'S ORIGINAL PREFACE.
+
+
+Among the many peculiarities which distinguished the late J. M. W.
+Turner from other landscape painters, not the least notable, in my
+apprehension, were his earnest desire to arrange his works in connected
+groups, and his evident intention, with respect to each drawing, that it
+should be considered as expressing part of a continuous system of
+thought. The practical result of this feeling was that he commenced many
+series of drawings,--and, if any accident interfered with the
+continuation of the work, hastily concluded them,--under titles
+representing rather the relation which the executed designs bore to the
+materials accumulated in his own mind, than the position which they
+could justifiably claim when contemplated by others. The _River Scenery_
+was closed without a single drawing of a rapidly running stream; and the
+prints of his annual tours were assembled, under the title of the
+_Rivers of France_, without including a single illustration either of
+the Rhone or the Garonne.
+
+The title under which the following plates are now presented to the
+public, is retained merely out of respect to this habit of Turner's.
+Under that title he commenced the publication, and executed the vignette
+for its title-page, intending doubtless to make it worthy of taking rank
+with, if not far above, the consistent and extensive series of the
+_Southern Coast_, executed in his earlier years. But procrastination and
+accident equally interfered with his purpose. The excellent engraver Mr.
+Lupton, in co-operation with whom the work was undertaken, was
+unfortunately also a man of genius, and seems to have been just as
+capricious as Turner himself in the application of his powers to the
+matter in hand. Had one of the parties in the arrangement been a mere
+plodding man of business, the work would have proceeded; but between the
+two men of talent it came very naturally to a stand. They petted each
+other by reciprocal indulgence of delay; and at Turner's death, the
+series, so magnificently announced under the title of the _Harbors of
+England_, consisted only of twelve plates, all the less worthy of their
+high-sounding title in that, while they included illustrations of some
+of the least important of the watering-places, they did not include any
+illustration whatever of such harbors of England as Liverpool, Shields,
+Yarmouth, or Bristol. Such as they were, however, I was requested to
+undertake their illustration. As the offer was made at a moment when
+much nonsense, in various forms, was being written about Turner and his
+works; and among the twelve plates there were four[H] which I considered
+among the very finest that had been executed from his marine subjects, I
+accepted the trust; partly to prevent the really valuable series of
+engravings from being treated with injustice, and partly because there
+were several features in them by which I could render more intelligible
+some remarks I wished to make on Turner's marine painting in general.
+
+    [H] Portsmouth, Sheerness, Scarborough, and Whitby.
+
+These remarks, therefore, I have thrown together, in a connected form;
+less with a view to the illustration of these particular plates, than of
+the general system of ship-painting which was characteristic of the
+great artist. I have afterwards separately noted the points which seemed
+to me most deserving of attention in the plates themselves.
+
+Of archaeological information the reader will find none. The designs
+themselves are, in most instances, little more than spirited sea-pieces,
+with such indistinct suggestion of local features in the distance as may
+justify the name given to the subject; but even when, as in the case of
+the Dover and Portsmouth, there is something approaching topographical
+detail, I have not considered it necessary to lead the reader into
+inquiries which certainly Turner himself never thought of; nor do I
+suppose it would materially add to the interest of these cloud distances
+or rolling seas, if I had the time--which I have not--to collect the
+most complete information respecting the raising of Prospect Rows, and
+the establishment of circulating libraries.
+
+DENMARK HILL.
+[1856.]
+
+
+
+
+THE HARBORS OF ENGLAND.
+
+
+Of all things, living or lifeless, upon this strange earth, there is but
+one which, having reached the mid-term of appointed human endurance on
+it, I still regard with unmitigated amazement. I know, indeed, that all
+around me is wonderful--but I cannot answer it with wonder:--a dark
+veil, with the foolish words, NATURE OF THINGS, upon it, casts its
+deadening folds between me and their dazzling strangeness. Flowers open,
+and stars rise, and it seems to me they could have done no less. The
+mystery of distant mountain-blue only makes me reflect that the earth is
+of necessity mountainous;--the sea-wave breaks at my feet, and I do not
+see how it should have remained unbroken. But one object there is still,
+which I never pass without the renewed wonder of childhood, and that is
+the bow of a Boat. Not of a racing-wherry, or revenue cutter, or clipper
+yacht; but the blunt head of a common, bluff, undecked sea-boat, lying
+aside in its furrow of beach sand. The sum of Navigation is in that. You
+may magnify it or decorate as you will: you do not add to the wonder of
+it. Lengthen it into hatchet-like edge of iron,--strengthen it with
+complex tracery of ribs of oak,--carve it and gild it till a column of
+light moves beneath it on the sea,--you have made no more of it than it
+was at first. That rude simplicity of bent plank, that can breast its
+way through the death that is in the deep sea, has in it the soul of
+shipping. Beyond this, we may have more work, more men, more money; we
+cannot have more miracle.
+
+For there is, first, an infinite strangeness in the perfection of the
+thing, as work of human hands. I know nothing else that man does, which
+is perfect, but that. All his other doings have some sign of weakness,
+affectation, or ignorance in them. They are overfinished or
+underfinished; they do not quite answer their end, or they show a mean
+vanity in answering it too well.
+
+But the boat's bow is naively perfect: complete without an effort. The
+man who made it knew not he was making anything beautiful, as he bent
+its planks into those mysterious, ever-changing curves. It grows under
+his hand into the image of a sea-shell; the seal, as it were, of the
+flowing of the great tides and streams of ocean stamped on its delicate
+rounding. He leaves it when all is done, without a boast. It is simple
+work, but it will keep out water. And every plank thence-forward is a
+Fate, and has men's lives wreathed in the knots of it, as the cloth-yard
+shaft had their deaths in its plumes.
+
+Then, also, it is wonderful on account of the greatness of the thing
+accomplished. No other work of human hands ever gained so much.
+Steam-engines and telegraphs indeed help us to fetch, and carry, and
+talk; they lift weights for us, and bring messages, with less trouble
+than would have been needed otherwise; this saving of trouble, however,
+does not constitute a new faculty, it only enhances the powers we
+already possess. But in that bow of the boat is the gift of another
+world. Without it, what prison wall would be so strong as that "white
+and wailing fringe" of sea. What maimed creatures were we all, chained
+to our rocks, Andromeda-like, or wandering by the endless shores;
+wasting our incommunicable strength, and pining in hopeless watch of
+unconquerable waves? The nails that fasten together the planks of the
+boat's bow are the rivets of the fellowship of the world. Their iron
+does more than draw lightning out of heaven, it leads love round the
+earth.
+
+Then also, it is wonderful on account of the greatness of the enemy that
+it does battle with. To lift dead weight; to overcome length of languid
+space; to multiply or systematize a given force; this we may see done by
+the bar, or beam, or wheel, without wonder. But to war with that living
+fury of waters, to bare its breast, moment after moment, against the
+unwearied enmity of ocean,--the subtle, fitful, implacable smiting of
+the black waves, provoking each other on, endlessly, all the infinite
+march of the Atlantic rolling on behind them to their help,--and still
+to strike them back into a wreath of smoke and futile foam, and win its
+way against them, and keep its charge of life from them;--does any other
+soulless thing do as much as this?
+
+I should not have talked of this feeling of mine about a boat, if I had
+thought it was mine only; but I believe it to be common to all of us who
+are not seamen. With the seaman, wonder changes into fellowship and
+close affection; but to all landsmen, from youth upwards, the boat
+remains a piece of enchantment; at least unless we entangle our vanity
+in it, and refine it away into mere lath, giving up all its protective
+nobleness for pace. With those in whose eyes the perfection of a boat is
+swift fragility, I have no sympathy. The glory of a boat is, first its
+steadiness of poise--its assured standing on the clear softness of the
+abyss; and, after that, so much capacity of progress by oar or sail as
+shall be consistent with this defiance of the treachery of the sea. And,
+this being understood, it is very notable how commonly the poets,
+creating for themselves an ideal of motion, fasten upon the charm of a
+boat. They do not usually express any desire for wings, or, if they do,
+it is only in some vague and half-unintended phrase, such as "flit or
+soar," involving wingedness. Seriously, they are evidently content to
+let the wings belong to Horse, or Muse, or Angel, rather than to
+themselves; but they all, somehow or other, express an honest wish for a
+Spiritual Boat. I will not dwell on poor Shelley's paper navies, and
+seas of quicksilver, lest we should begin to think evil of boats in
+general because of that traitorous one in Spezzia Bay; but it is a
+triumph to find the pastorally minded Wordsworth imagine no other way of
+visiting the stars than in a boat "no bigger than the crescent moon";[I]
+and to find Tennyson--although his boating, in an ordinary way, has a
+very marshy and punt-like character--at last, in his highest
+inspiration, enter in where the wind began "to sweep a music out of
+sheet and shroud."[J] But the chief triumph of all is in Dante. He had
+known all manner of traveling; had been borne through vacancy on the
+shoulders of chimeras, and lifted through upper heaven in the grasp of
+its spirits; but yet I do not remember that he ever expresses any
+positive _wish_ on such matters, except for a boat.
+
+    [I] Prologue to _Peter Bell_.
+
+    [J] _In Memoriam_, ci.
+
+    "Guido, I wish that Lapo, thou, and I,
+      Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend
+      A magic ship, whose charmed sails should fly
+      With winds at will where'er our thoughts might wend,
+    So that no change nor any evil chance
+      Should mar our joyous voyage; but it might be
+      That even satiety should still enhance
+      Between our souls their strict community:
+    And that the bounteous wizard then would place
+      Vanna and Bice, and our Lapo's love,
+      Companions of our wandering, and would grace
+    With passionate talk, wherever we might rove,
+    Our time, and each were as content and free
+    As I believe that thou and I should be."
+
+And of all the descriptions of motion in the _Divina Commedia_, I do not
+think there is another quite so fine as that in which Dante has
+glorified the old fable of Charon by giving a boat also to the bright
+sea which surrounds the mountain of Purgatory, bearing the redeemed
+souls to their place of trial; only an angel is now the pilot, and there
+is no stroke of laboring oar, for his wings are the sails.
+
+                          "My preceptor silent yet
+    Stood, while the brightness that we first discerned
+    Opened the form of wings: then, when he knew
+    The pilot, cried aloud, 'Down, down; bend low
+    Thy knees; behold God's angel: fold thy hands:
+    Now shalt thou see true ministers indeed.
+    Lo! how all human means he sets at nought;
+    So that nor oar he needs, nor other sail
+    Except his wings, between such distant shores.
+    Lo! how straight up to heaven he holds them reared,
+    Winnowing the air with those eternal plumes,
+    That not like mortal hairs fall off or change.'
+
+      "As more and more toward us came, more bright
+    Appeared the bird of God, nor could the eye
+    Endure his splendor near: I mine bent down.
+    He drove ashore in a small bark so swift
+    And light, that in its course no wave it drank.
+    The heavenly steersman at the prow was seen,
+    Visibly written blessed in his looks.
+    Within, a hundred spirits and more there sat."
+
+I have given this passage at length, because it seems to me that Dante's
+most inventive adaptation of the fable of Charon to Heaven has not been
+regarded with the interest that it really deserves; and because, also,
+it is a description that should be remembered by every traveler when
+first he sees the white fork of the felucca sail shining on the Southern
+Sea. Not that Dante had ever seen such sails;[K] his thought was utterly
+irrespective of the form of canvas in any ship of the period; but it is
+well to be able to attach this happy image to those felucca sails, as
+they now float white and soft above the blue glowing of the bays of
+Adria. Nor are other images wanting in them. Seen far away on the
+horizon, the Neapolitan felucca has all the aspect of some strange bird
+stooping out of the air and just striking the water with its claws;
+while the Venetian, when its painted sails are at full swell in
+sunshine, is as beautiful as a butterfly with its wings half-closed.[L]
+There is something also in them that might remind us of the variegated
+and spotted angel wings of Orcagna, only the Venetian sail never looks
+majestic; it is too quaint and strange, yet with no peacock's pride or
+vulgar gayety,--nothing of Milton's Dalilah:
+
+    "So bedecked, ornate and gay
+    Like a stately ship
+    Of Tarsus, bound for the Isles
+    Of Javan or Gadire
+    With all her bravery on and tackle trim,
+    Sails filled and streamers waving."
+
+That description could only have been written in a time of vulgar women
+and vulgar vessels. The utmost vanity of dress in a woman of the
+fourteenth century would have given no image of "sails filled or
+streamers waving"; nor does the look or action of a really "stately"
+ship ever suggest any image of the motion of a weak or vain woman. The
+beauties of the Court of Charles II., and the gilded galleys of the
+Thames, might fitly be compared; but the pomp of the Venetian
+fisher-boat is like neither. The sail seems dyed in its fullness by the
+sunshine, as the rainbow dyes a cloud; the rich stains upon it fade and
+reappear, as its folds swell or fall; worn with the Adrian storms, its
+rough woof has a kind of noble dimness upon it, and its colors seem as
+grave, inherent, and free from vanity as the spots of the leopard, or
+veins of the seashell.
+
+    [K] I am not quite sure of this, not having studied with any care
+    the forms of mediaeval shipping; but in all the MSS. I have examined
+    the sails of the shipping represented are square.
+
+    [L] It is not a little strange that in all the innumerable paintings
+    of Venice, old and modern, no notice whatever had been taken of
+    these sails, though they are _exactly_ the most striking features of
+    the marine scenery around the city, until Turner fastened upon them,
+    painting one important picture, "The Sun of Venice," entirely in
+    their illustration.
+
+Yet, in speaking of poets' love of boats, I ought to have limited the
+love to _modern_ poets; Dante, in this respect, as in nearly every
+other, being far in advance of his age. It is not often that I
+congratulate myself upon the days in which I happen to live; but I do so
+in this respect, that, compared with every other period of the world,
+this nineteenth century (or rather, the period between 1750 and 1850)
+may not improperly be called the Age of Boats; while the classic and
+chivalric times, in which boats were partly dreaded, partly despised,
+may respectively be characterized, with regard to their means of
+locomotion, as the Age of Chariots, and the Age of Horses.
+
+For, whatever perfection and costliness there may be in the present
+decorations, harnessing, and horsing of any English or Parisian wheel
+equipage, I apprehend that we can from none of them form any high ideal
+of wheel conveyance; and that unless we had seen an Egyptian king
+bending his bow with his horses at the gallop, or a Greek knight leaning
+with his poised lance over the shoulder of his charioteer, we have no
+right to consider ourselves as thoroughly knowing what the word
+"chariot," in its noblest acceptation, means.
+
+So, also, though much chivalry is yet left in us, and we English still
+know several things about horses, I believe that if we had seen
+Charlemagne and Roland ride out hunting from Aix, or Coeur de Lion trot
+into camp on a sunny evening at Ascalon, or a Florentine lady canter
+down the Val d'Arno in Dante's time, with her hawk on her wrist, we
+should have had some other ideas even about horses than the best we can
+have now. But most assuredly, nothing that ever swung at the quay sides
+of Carthage, or glowed with crusaders' shields above the bays of Syria,
+could give to any contemporary human creature such an idea of the
+meaning of the word Boat, as may be now gained by any mortal happy
+enough to behold as much as a Newcastle collier beating against the
+wind. In the classical period, indeed, there was some importance given
+to shipping as the means of locking a battle-field together on the
+waves; but in the chivalric period, the whole mind of man is withdrawn
+from the sea, regarding it merely as a treacherous impediment, over
+which it was necessary sometimes to find conveyance, but from which the
+thoughts were always turned impatiently, fixing themselves in green
+fields, and pleasures that may be enjoyed by land--the very supremacy of
+the horse necessitating the scorn of the sea, which would not be trodden
+by hoofs.
+
+It is very interesting to note how repugnant every oceanic idea appears
+to be to the whole nature of our principal English mediaeval poet,
+Chaucer. Read first the Man of Lawe's Tale, in which the Lady Constance
+is continually floated up and down the Mediterranean, and the German
+Ocean, in a ship by herself; carried from Syria all the way to
+Northumberland, and there wrecked upon the coast; thence yet again
+driven up and down among the waves for five years, she and her child;
+and yet, all this while, Chaucer does not let fall a single word
+descriptive of the sea, or express any emotion whatever about it, or
+about the ship. He simply tells us the lady sailed here and was wrecked
+there; but neither he nor his audience appear to be capable of receiving
+any sensation, but one of simple aversion, from waves, ships, or sands.
+Compare with his absolutely apathetic recital, the description by a
+modern poet of the sailing of a vessel, charged with the fate of another
+Constance:
+
+    "It curled not Tweed alone, that breeze--
+    For far upon Northumbrian seas
+      It freshly blew, and strong;
+    Where from high Whitby's cloistered pile,
+    Bound to St. Cuthbert's holy isle,
+      It bore a bark along.
+    Upon the gale she stooped her side,
+    And bounded o'er the swelling tide
+      As she were dancing home.
+    The merry seamen laughed to see
+    Their gallant ship so lustily
+      Furrow the green sea foam."
+
+Now just as Scott enjoys this sea breeze, so does Chaucer the soft air
+of the woods; the moment the older poet lands, he is himself again, his
+poverty of language in speaking of the ship is not because he despises
+description, but because he has nothing to describe. Hear him upon the
+ground in Spring:
+
+    "These woodes else recoveren greene,
+    That drie in winter ben to sene,
+    And the erth waxeth proud withall,
+    For sweet dewes that on it fall,
+    And the poore estate forget,
+    In which that winter had it set:
+    And then becomes the ground so proude,
+    That it wol have a newe shroude,
+    And maketh so queint his robe and faire,
+    That it had hewes an hundred paire,
+    Of grasse and floures, of Inde and Pers,
+    And many hewes full divers:
+    That is the robe I mean ywis
+    Through which the ground to praisen is."
+
+In like manner, wherever throughout his poems we find Chaucer
+enthusiastic, it is on a sunny day in the "good green-wood," but the
+slightest approach to the sea-shore makes him shiver; and his antipathy
+finds at last positive expression, and becomes the principal foundation
+of the Frankeleine's Tale, in which a lady, waiting for her husband's
+return in a castle by the sea, behaves and expresses herself as
+follows:--
+
+      "Another time wold she sit and thinke,
+    And cast her eyen dounward fro the brinke;
+    But whan she saw the grisly rockes blake,
+    For veray fere so wold hire herte quake
+    That on hire feet she might hire not sustene
+    Than wold she sit adoun upon the grene,
+    And pitously into the see behold,
+    And say right thus, with careful sighes cold.
+      'Eterne God, that thurgh thy purveance
+    Ledest this world by certain governance,
+    In idel, as men sain, ye nothing make.
+    _But, lord, thise grisly fendly rockes blake,
+    That semen rather a foule confusion
+    Of werk, than any faire creation_
+    Of swiche a parfit wise God and stable,
+    Why han ye wrought this werk unresonable?'"
+
+The desire to have the rocks out of her way is indeed severely punished
+in the sequel of the tale; but it is not the less characteristic of the
+age, and well worth meditating upon, in comparison with the feelings of
+an unsophisticated modern French or English girl among the black rocks
+of Dieppe or Ramsgate.
+
+On the other hand, much might be said about that peculiar love of _green
+fields and birds_ in the Middle Ages; and of all with which it is
+connected, purity and health in manners and heart, as opposed to the
+too frequent condition of the modern mind--
+
+      "As for the birds in the thicket,
+    Thrush or ousel in leafy niche,
+    Linnet or finch--she was far too rich
+    To care for a morning concert to which
+      She was welcome, without a ticket."[M]
+
+    [M] Thomas Hood.
+
+But this would lead us far afield, and the main fact I have to point out
+to the reader is the transition of human grace and strength from the
+exercises of the land to those of the sea in the course of the last
+three centuries.
+
+Down to Elizabeth's time chivalry lasted; and grace of dress and mien,
+and all else that was connected with chivalry. Then came the ages which,
+when they have taken their due place in the depths of the past, will be,
+by a wise and clear-sighted futurity, perhaps well comprehended under a
+common name, as the ages of Starch; periods of general stiffening and
+bluish-whitening, with a prevailing washerwoman's taste in everything;
+involving a change of steel armor into cambric; of natural hair into
+peruke; of natural walking into that which will disarrange no
+wristbands; of plain language into quips and embroideries; and of human
+life in general, from a green race-course, where to be defeated was at
+worst only to fall behind and recover breath, into a slippery pole, to
+be climbed with toil and contortion, and in clinging to which, each
+man's foot is on his neighbor's head.
+
+But, meanwhile, the marine deities were incorruptible. It was not
+possible to starch the sea; and precisely as the stiffness fastened upon
+men, it vanished from ships. What had once been a mere raft, with rows
+of formal benches, pushed along by laborious flap of oars, and with
+infinite fluttering of flags and swelling of poops above, gradually
+began to lean more heavily into the deep water, to sustain a gloomy
+weight of guns, to draw back its spider-like feebleness of limb, and
+open its bosom to the wind, and finally darkened down from all its
+painted vanities into the long, low hull, familiar with the overflying
+foam; that has no other pride but in its daily duty and victory; while,
+through all these changes, it gained continually in grace, strength,
+audacity, and beauty, until at last it has reached such a pitch of all
+these, that there is not, except the very loveliest creatures of the
+living world, anything in nature so absolutely notable, bewitching, and,
+according to its means and measure, heart-occupying, as a well-handled
+ship under sail in a stormy day. Any ship, from lowest to proudest, has
+due place in that architecture of the sea; beautiful, not so much in
+this or that piece of it, as in the unity of all, from cottage to
+cathedral, into their great buoyant dynasty. Yet, among them, the
+fisher-boat, corresponding to the cottage on the land (only far more
+sublime than a cottage ever can be), is on the whole the thing most
+venerable. I doubt if ever academic grove were half so fit for
+profitable meditation as the little strip of shingle between two black,
+steep, overhanging sides of stranded fishing-boats. The clear, heavy
+water-edge of ocean rising and falling close to their bows, in that
+unaccountable way which the sea has always in calm weather, turning the
+pebbles over and over as if with a rake, to look for something, and then
+stopping a moment down at the bottom of the bank, and coming up again
+with a little run and clash, throwing a foot's depth of salt crystal in
+an instant between you and the round stone you were going to take in
+your hand; sighing, all the while, as if it would infinitely rather be
+doing something else. And the dark flanks of the fishing-boats all
+aslope above, in their shining quietness, hot in the morning sun, rusty
+and seamed with square patches of plank nailed over their rents; just
+rough enough to let the little flat-footed fisher-children haul or twist
+themselves up to the gunwales, and drop back again along some stray
+rope; just round enough to remind us, in their broad and gradual curves,
+of the sweep of the green surges they know so well, and of the hours
+when those old sides of seared timber, all ashine with the sea, plunge
+and dip into the deep green purity of the mounded waves more joyfully
+than a deer lies down among the grass of spring, the soft white cloud of
+foam opening momentarily at the bows, and fading or flying high into the
+breeze where the sea-gulls toss and shriek,--the joy and beauty of it,
+all the while, so mingled with the sense of unfathomable danger, and the
+human effort and sorrow going on perpetually from age to age, waves
+rolling forever, and winds moaning forever, and faithful hearts trusting
+and sickening forever, and brave lives dashed away about the rattling
+beach like weeds forever; and still at the helm of every lonely boat,
+through starless night and hopeless dawn, His hand, who spread the
+fisher's net over the dust of the Sidonian palaces, and gave into the
+fisher's hand the keys of the kingdom of heaven.
+
+Next after the fishing-boat--which, as I said, in the architecture of
+the sea represents the cottage, more especially the pastoral or
+agricultural cottage, watchful over some pathless domain of moorland or
+arable, as the fishing-boat swims, humbly in the midst of the broad
+green fields and hills of ocean, out of which it has to win such fruit
+as they can give, and to compass with net or drag such flocks as it may
+find,--next to this ocean-cottage ranks in interest, it seems to me, the
+small, over-wrought, under-crewed, ill-caulked merchant brig or
+schooner; the kind of ship which first shows its couple of thin masts
+over the low fields or marshes as we near any third-rate sea-port; and
+which is sure somewhere to stud the great space of glittering water,
+seen from any sea-cliff, with its four or five square-set sails. Of the
+larger and more polite tribes of merchant vessels, three-masted, and
+passenger-carrying, I have nothing to say, feeling in general little
+sympathy with people who want to _go_ anywhere; nor caring much about
+anything, which in the essence of it expresses a desire to get to other
+sides of the world; but only for homely and stay-at-home ships, that
+live their life and die their death about English rocks. Neither have I
+any interest in the higher branches of commerce, such as traffic with
+spice islands, and porterage of painted tea-chests or carved ivory; for
+all this seems to me to fall under the head of commerce of the
+drawing-room; costly, but not venerable. I respect in the merchant
+service only those ships that carry coals, herrings, salt, timber, iron,
+and such other commodities, and that have disagreeable odor, and
+unwashed decks. But there are few things more impressive to me than one
+of these ships lying up against some lonely quay in a black sea-fog,
+with the furrow traced under its tawny keel far in the harbor slime. The
+noble misery that there is in it, the might of its rent and strained
+unseemliness, its wave-worn melancholy, resting there for a little while
+in the comfortless ebb, unpitied, and claiming no pity; still less
+honored, least of all conscious of any claim to honor; casting and
+craning by due balance whatever is in its hold up to the pier, in quiet
+truth of time; spinning of wheel, and slackening of rope, and swinging
+of spade, in as accurate cadence as a waltz music; one or two of its
+crew, perhaps, away forward, and a hungry boy and yelping dog eagerly
+interested in something from which a blue dull smoke rises out of pot or
+pan; but dark-browed and silent, their limbs slack, like the ropes above
+them, entangled as they are in those inextricable meshes about the
+patched knots and heaps of ill-reefed sable sail. What a majestic sense
+of service in all that languor! the rest of human limbs and hearts, at
+utter need, not in sweet meadows or soft air, but in harbor slime and
+biting fog; so drawing their breath once more, to go out again, without
+lament, from between the two skeletons of pier-heads, vocal with wash of
+under wave, into the gray troughs of tumbling brine; there, as they can,
+with slacked rope, and patched sail, and leaky hull, again to roll and
+stagger far away amidst the wind and salt sleet, from dawn to dusk and
+dusk to dawn, winning day by day their daily bread; and for last reward,
+when their old hands, on some winter night, lose feeling along the
+frozen ropes, and their old eyes miss mark of the lighthouse quenched in
+foam, the so-long impossible Rest, that shall hunger no more, neither
+thirst any more,--their eyes and mouths filled with the brown sea-sand.
+
+After these most venerable, to my mind, of all ships, properly so
+styled, I find nothing of comparable interest in any floating fabric
+until we come to the great achievement of the 19th century. For one
+thing this century will in after ages be considered to have done in a
+superb manner, and one thing, I think, only. It has not distinguished
+itself in political spheres; still less in artistical. It has produced
+no golden age by its Reason; neither does it appear eminent for the
+constancy of its Faith. Its telescopes and telegraphs would be
+creditable to it, if it had not in their pursuit forgotten in great part
+how to see clearly with its eyes, and to talk honestly with its tongue.
+Its natural history might have been creditable to it also, if it could
+have conquered its habit of considering natural history to be mainly the
+art of writing Latin names on white tickets. But, as it is, none of
+these things will be hereafter considered to have been got on with by us
+as well as might be; whereas it will always be said of us, with unabated
+reverence,
+
+"THEY BUILT SHIPS OF THE LINE."
+
+Take it all in all, a Ship of the Line is the most honorable thing that
+man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced. By himself, unhelped, he
+can do better things than ships of the line; he can make poems and
+pictures, and other such concentrations of what is best in him. But as a
+being living in flocks, and hammering out, with alternate strokes and
+mutual agreement, what is necessary for him in those flocks, to get or
+produce, the ship of the line is his first work. Into that he has put as
+much of his human patience, common sense, forethought, experimental
+philosophy, self-control, habits of order and obedience, thoroughly
+wrought handwork, defiance of brute elements, careless courage, careful
+patriotism, and calm expectation of the judgment of God, as can well be
+put into a space of 300 feet long by 80 broad. And I am thankful to have
+lived in an age when I could see this thing so done.
+
+Considering, then, our shipping, under the three principal types of
+fishing-boat, collier, and ship of the line, as the great glory of this
+age; and the "New Forest" of mast and yard that follows the windings of
+the Thames, to be, take it all in all, a more majestic scene, I don't
+say merely than any of our streets or palaces as they now are, but even
+than the best that streets and palaces can generally be; it has often
+been a matter of serious thought to me how far this chiefly substantial
+thing done by the nation ought to be represented by the art of the
+nation; how far our great artists ought seriously to devote themselves
+to such perfect painting of our ships as should reveal to later
+generations--lost perhaps in clouds of steam and floating troughs of
+ashes--the aspect of an ancient ship of battle under sail.
+
+To which, I fear, the answer must be sternly this: That no great art
+ever was, or can be, employed in the careful imitation of the work of
+man as its principal subject. That is to say, art will not bear to be
+reduplicated. A ship is a noble thing, and a cathedral a noble thing,
+but a painted ship or a painted cathedral is not a noble thing. Art
+which reduplicates art is necessarily second-rate art. I know no
+principle more irrefragably authoritative than that which I had long ago
+occasion to express: "All noble art is the expression of man's delight
+in God's work; not in his own."
+
+"How!" it will be asked, "Are Stanfield, Isabey, and Prout necessarily
+artists of the second order because they paint ships and buildings
+instead of trees and clouds?" Yes, necessarily of the second order; so
+far as they paint ships rather than sea, and so far as they paint
+buildings rather than the natural light, and color, and work of years
+upon those buildings. For, in this respect, a ruined building is a noble
+subject, just as far as man's work has therein been subdued by nature's;
+and Stanfield's chief dignity is his being a painter less of shipping
+than of the seal of time or decay upon shipping.[N] For a wrecked ship,
+or shattered boat, is a noble subject, while a ship in full sail, or a
+perfect boat, is an ignoble one; not merely because the one is by
+reason of its ruin more picturesque than the other, but because it is a
+nobler act in man to meditate upon Fate as it conquers his work, than
+upon that work itself.
+
+    [N] As in the very beautiful picture of this year's Academy, "The
+    Abandoned."
+
+Shipping, therefore, in its perfection, never can become the subject of
+noble art; and that just because to represent it in its perfection would
+tax the powers of art to the utmost. If a great painter could rest in
+drawing a ship, as he can rest in drawing a piece of drapery, we might
+sometimes see vessels introduced by the noblest workmen, and treated by
+them with as much delight as they would show in scattering luster over
+an embroidered dress, or knitting the links of a coat of mail. But ships
+cannot be drawn at times of rest. More complicated in their anatomy than
+the human frame itself, so far as that frame is outwardly discernible;
+liable to all kinds of strange accidental variety in position and
+movement, yet in each position subject to imperative laws which can only
+be followed by unerring knowledge; and involving, in the roundings and
+foldings of sail and hull, delicacies of drawing greater than exist in
+any other inorganic object, except perhaps a snow wreath,[O]--they
+present, irrespective of sea or sky, or anything else around them,
+difficulties which could only be vanquished by draughtsmanship quite
+accomplished enough to render even the subtlest lines of the human face
+and form. But the artist who has once attained such skill as this will
+not devote it to the drawing of ships. He who can paint the face of St.
+Paul will not elaborate the parting timbers of the vessel in which he is
+wrecked; and he who can represent the astonishment of the apostles at
+the miraculous draught will not be solicitous about accurately showing
+that their boat is overloaded.
+
+    [O] The catenary and other curves of tension which a sail assumes
+    under the united influence of the wind, its own weight, and the
+    particular tensions of the various ropes by which it is attached, or
+    against which it presses, show at any moment complexities of
+    arrangement to which fidelity, except after the study of a lifetime,
+    is impossible.
+
+"What!" it will perhaps be replied, "have, then, ships never been
+painted perfectly yet, even by the men who have devoted most attention
+to them?" Assuredly not. A ship never yet has been painted at all, in
+any other sense than men have been painted in "Landscapes with figures."
+Things have been painted which have a general effect of ships, just as
+things have been painted which have a general effect of shepherds or
+banditti; but the best average ship-painting no more reaches the truth
+of ships than the equestrian troops in one of Van der Meulen's
+battle-pieces express the higher truths of humanity.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 1.]
+
+Take a single instance. I do not know any work in which, on the whole,
+there is a more unaffected love of ships for their own sake, and a
+fresher feeling of sea breeze always blowing, than Stanfield's "Coast
+Scenery." Now, let the reader take up that book, and look through all
+the plates of it at the way in which the most important parts of a
+ship's skeleton are drawn, those most wonderful junctions of mast with
+mast, corresponding to the knee or hip in the human frame, technically
+known as "Tops." Under its very simplest form, in one of those poor
+collier brigs, which I have above endeavored to recommend to the readers
+affection, the junction of the top-gallant-mast with the topmast, when
+the sail is reefed, will present itself under no less complex and
+mysterious form than this in Fig. 1, a horned knot of seven separate
+pieces of timber, irrespective of the two masts and the yard; the whole
+balanced and involved in an apparently inextricable web of chain and
+rope, consisting of at least sixteen ropes about the top-gallant-mast,
+and some twenty-five crossing each other in every imaginable degree of
+slackness and slope about the topmast. Two-thirds of these ropes are
+omitted in the cut, because I could not draw them without taking more
+time and pains than the point to be illustrated was worth; the thing, as
+it is, being drawn quite well enough to give some idea of the facts of
+it. Well, take up Stanfield's "Coast Scenery," and look through it in
+search of tops, and you will invariably find them represented as in Fig.
+2, or even with fewer lines; the example Fig. 2 being one of the tops of
+the frigate running into Portsmouth harbor, magnified to about twice its
+size in the plate.
+
+[Illustration: FIG. 2.]
+
+"Well, but it was impossible to do more on so small a scale." By no
+means: but take what scale you choose, of Stanfield's or any other
+marine painter's most elaborate painting, and let me magnify the study
+of the real top in proportion, and the deficiency of detail will always
+be found equally great: I mean in the work of the higher artists, for
+there are of course many efforts at greater accuracy of delineation by
+those painters of ships who are to the higher marine painter what
+botanical draughtsmen are to the landscapists; but just as in the
+botanical engraving the spirit and life of the plant are always lost, so
+in the technical ship-painting the life of the ship is always lost,
+without, as far as I can see, attaining, even by this sacrifice,
+anything like completeness of mechanical delineation. At least, I never
+saw the ship drawn yet which gave me the slightest idea of the
+entanglement of real rigging.
+
+Respecting this lower kind of ship-painting, it is always matter of
+wonder to me that it satisfies sailors. Some years ago I happened
+to stand longer than pleased my pensioner guide before Turner's
+"Battle of Trafalgar," at Greenwich Hospital; a picture which, at
+a moderate estimate, is simply worth all the rest of the
+hospital--ground--walls--pictures and models put together. My guide,
+supposing me to be detained by indignant wonder at seeing it in so good
+a place, assented to my supposed, sentiments by muttering in a low
+voice: "Well, sir, it _is_ a shame that that thing should be there. We
+ought to 'a 'ad a Uggins; that's sartain." I was not surprised that my
+sailor friend should be disgusted at seeing the _Victory_ lifted nearly
+right out of the water, and all the sails of the fleet blowing about to
+that extent that the crews might as well have tried to reef as many
+thunder-clouds. But I was surprised at his perfect repose of respectful
+faith in "Uggins," who appeared to me--unfortunate landsman as I was--to
+give no more idea of the look of a ship of the line going through the
+sea, than might be obtained from seeing one of the correct models at the
+top of the hall floated in a fishpond.
+
+Leaving, however, the sailor to his enjoyment, on such grounds as it may
+be, of this model drawing, and being prepared to find only a vague and
+hasty shadowing forth of shipping in the works of artists proper, we
+will glance briefly at the different stages of excellence which such
+shadowing forth has reached, and note in their consecutive changes the
+feelings with which shipping has been regarded at different periods of
+art.
+
+1. _Mediaeval Period._ The vessel is regarded merely as a sort of
+sea-carriage, and painted only so far as it is necessary for complete
+display of the groups of soldiers or saints on the deck: a great deal of
+quaint shipping, richly hung with shields, and gorgeous with banners,
+is, however, thus incidently represented in 15th-century manuscripts,
+embedded in curly green waves of sea full of long fish; and although
+there is never the slightest expression of real sea character, of
+motion, gloom, or spray, there is more real interest of marine detail
+and incident than in many later compositions.
+
+2. _Early Venetian Period._ A great deal of tolerably careful
+boat-drawing occurs in the pictures of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini,
+deserving separate mention among the marine schools, in confirmation of
+what has been stated above, that the drawing of boats is more difficult
+than that of the human form. For, long after all the perspectives and
+fore-shortenings of the human body were completely understood, as well
+as those of architecture, it remained utterly beyond the power of the
+artists of the time to draw a boat with even tolerable truth. Boats are
+always tilted up on end, or too long, or too short, or too high in the
+water. Generally they appear to be regarded with no interest whatever,
+and are painted merely where they are matters of necessity. This is
+perfectly natural: we pronounce that there is romance in the Venetian
+conveyance by oars, merely because we ourselves are in the habit of
+being dragged by horses. A Venetian, on the other hand, sees vulgarity
+in a gondola, and thinks the only true romance is in a hackney coach.
+And thus, it was no more likely that a painter in the days of Venetian
+power should pay much attention to the shipping in the Grand Canal than
+that an English artist should at present concentrate the brightest rays
+of his genius on a cab-stand.
+
+3. _Late Venetian Period._ Deserving mention only for its notably
+negative character. None of the great Venetian painters, Tintoret,
+Titian, Veronese, Bellini, Giorgione, Bonifazio, ever introduce a ship
+if they can help it. They delight in ponderous architecture, in grass,
+flowers, blue mountains, skies, clouds, and gay dresses; nothing comes
+amiss to them but ships and the sea. When they are forced to introduce
+these, they represent merely a dark-green plain, with reddish galleys
+spotted about it here and there, looking much like small models of
+shipping pinned on a green board. In their marine battles, there is
+seldom anything discernible except long rows of scarlet oars, and men in
+armor falling helplessly through them.
+
+4. _Late Roman Period._ That is to say, the time of the beginning of the
+Renaissance landscape by the Caracci, Claude, and Salvator. First, in
+their landscapes, shipping begins to assume something like independent
+character, and to be introduced for the sake of its picturesque
+interest; although what interest could be taken by any healthy human
+creature in such vessels as were then painted has always remained a
+mystery to me. The ships of Claude, having hulls of a shape something
+between a cocoa-nut and a high-heeled shoe, balanced on their keels on
+the top of the water, with some scaffolding and cross-sticks above, and
+a flag at the top of every stick, form perhaps the _purest_ exhibition
+of human inanity and fatuity which the arts have yet produced. The
+harbors also, in which these model navies ride, are worthy of all
+observation for the intensity of the false taste which, endeavoring to
+unite in them the characters of pleasure-ground and port, destroys the
+veracity of both. There are many inlets of the Italian seas where sweet
+gardens and regular terraces descend to the water's edge; but these are
+not the spots where merchant vessels anchor, or where bales are
+disembarked. On the other hand, there are many busy quays and noisy
+arsenals upon the shores of Italy; but Queen's palaces are not built
+upon the quays, nor are the docks in any wise adorned with
+conservatories or ruins. It was reserved for the genius of Claude to
+combine the luxurious with the lucrative, and rise to a commercial
+ideal, in which cables are fastened to temple pillars, and lighthouses
+adorned with rows of beaupots. It seems strange also that any power
+which Salvator showed in the treatment of other subjects utterly deserts
+him when he approaches the sea. Though always coarse, false, and vulgar,
+he has at least energy, and some degree of invention, as long as he
+remains on land; his terrestrial atrocities are animated, and his
+rock-born fancies formidable. But the sea air seems to dim his sight and
+paralyze his hand. His love of darkness and destruction, far from
+seeking sympathy in the rage of ocean, disappears as he approaches the
+beach; after having tortured the innocence of trees into demoniac
+convulsions, and shattered the loveliness of purple hills into colorless
+dislocation, he approaches the real wrath and restlessness of ocean
+without either admiration or dismay, and appears to feel nothing at its
+shore except a meager interest in bathers, fishermen, and gentlemen in
+court dress bargaining for state cabins. Of all the pictures by men who
+bear the reputation of great masters which I have ever seen in my life
+(except only some by Domenichino), the two large "Marines" in the Pitti
+Palace, attributed to Salvator, are, on the whole, the most vapid and
+vile examples of human want of understanding. In the folly of Claude
+there is still a gleam of grace and innocence; there is refreshment in
+his childishness, and tenderness in his inability. But the folly of
+Salvator is disgusting in its very nothingness: it is like the vacuity
+of a plague-room in an hospital, shut up in uncleansed silence, emptied
+of pain and motion, but not of infection.
+
+5. _Dutch Period._ Although in artistical qualities lower than is easily
+by language expressible, the Italian marine painting usually conveys an
+idea of three facts about the sea,--that it is green, that it is deep,
+and that the sun shines on it. The dark plain which stands for far away
+Adriatic with the Venetians, and the glinting swells of tamed wave
+which lap about the quays of Claude, agree in giving the general
+impression that the ocean consists of pure water, and is open to the
+pure sky. But the Dutch painters, while they attain considerably greater
+dexterity than the Italian in mere delineation of nautical incident,
+were by nature precluded from ever becoming aware of these common facts;
+and having, in reality, never in all their lives seen the sea, but only
+a shallow mixture of sea-water and sand; and also never in all their
+lives seen the sky, but only a lower element between them and it,
+composed of marsh exhalation and fog-bank; they are not to be with too
+great severity reproached for the dullness of their records of the
+nautical enterprise of Holland. _We_ only are to be reproached, who,
+familiar with the Atlantic, are yet ready to accept with faith, as types
+of sea, the small waves _en papillote_, and peruke-like puffs of
+farinaceous foam, which were the delight of Backhuysen and his compeers.
+If one could but arrest the connoisseurs in the fact of looking at them
+with belief, and, magically introducing the image of a true sea-wave,
+let it roll up to them through the room,--one massive fathom's height
+and rood's breadth of brine, passing them by but once,--dividing, Red
+Sea-like, on right hand and left,--but at least setting close before
+their eyes, for once in inevitable truth, what a sea-wave really is; its
+green mountainous giddiness of wrath, its overwhelming crest--heavy as
+iron, fitful as flame, clashing against the sky in long cloven
+edge,--its furrowed flanks, all ghastly clear, deep in transparent
+death, but all laced across with lurid nets of spume, and tearing open
+into meshed interstices their churned veil of silver fury, showing still
+the calm gray abyss below; that has no fury and no voice, but is as a
+grave always open, which the green sighing mounds do but hide for an
+instant as they pass. Would they, shuddering back from this wave of the
+true, implacable sea, turn forthwith to the papillotes? It might be so.
+It is what we are all doing, more or less, continually.
+
+Well, let the waves go their way; it is not of them that we have here
+to reason; but be it remembered, that men who cannot enter into the Mind
+of the Sea, cannot for the same reason enter into the Mind of Ships, in
+their contention with it; and the fluttering, tottering, high-pooped,
+flag-beset fleets of these Dutch painters have only this much
+superiority over the caricatures of the Italians, that they indeed
+appear in some degree to have been studied from the high-pooped and
+flag-beset nature which was in that age visible, while the Claude and
+Salvator ships are ideals of the studio. But the effort is wholly
+unsuccessful. Any one who has ever attempted to sketch a vessel in
+motion knows that he might as easily attempt to sketch a bird on the
+wing, or a trout on the dart. Ships can only be drawn, as animals must
+be, by the high instinct of momentary perception, which rarely developed
+itself in any Dutch painter, and least of all in their painters of
+marine. And thus the awkward forms of shipping, the shallow impurity of
+the sea, and the cold incapacity of the painter, joining in
+disadvantageous influence over them, the Dutch marine paintings may be
+simply, but circumstantially, described as the misrepresentation of
+undeveloped shipping in a discolored sea by distempered painters. An
+exception ought to be made in favor of the boats of Cuyp, which are
+generally well floated in calm and sunny water; and, though rather punts
+or tubs than boats, have in them some elements of a slow, warm,
+square-sailed, sleepy grandeur--respectable always, when compared either
+with the flickering follies of Backhuysen, or the monstrous, unmanly,
+and _a fortiori_, unsailorly absurdities of metaphysical vessels, puffed
+on their way by corpulent genii, or pushed by protuberant dolphins,
+which Rubens and the other so-called historical painters of his time
+were accustomed to introduce in the mythology of their court-adulation;
+that marvelous Faith of the 18th century, which will one day, and that
+not far off, be known for a thing more truly disgraceful to human nature
+than the Polynesian's dance round his feather idol, or Egyptian's
+worship of the food he fattened on. From Salvator and Domenichino it is
+possible to turn in a proud indignation, knowing that theirs are no
+fair examples of the human mind; but it is with humbled and woful anger
+that we must trace the degradation of the intellect of Rubens in his
+pictures of the life of Mary of Medicis.[P]
+
+    [P] "The town of Lyons, seated upon a chariot drawn by two lions,
+    _lifts its eyes towards heaven_, and admires there--'les nouveaux
+    Epoux,'--represented in the character of Jupiter and Juno."--_Notice
+    des Tableaux du Musee Imperial_, 2nde partie, Paris, 1854, p. 235.
+
+    "The Queen upon her throne holds with one hand the scepter, in the
+    other the balance. Minerva and Cupid are at her sides. Abundance and
+    Prosperity distribute metals, laurels, 'et d'autres recompenses,' to
+    the Genii of the Fine Arts. Time, crowned with the productions of
+    the seasons, leads France to the--Age of Gold!"--p. 239.
+
+    So thought the Queen, and Rubens, and the Court. Time himself,
+    "crowned with the productions of the seasons," was, meanwhile, as
+    Thomas Carlyle would have told us, "quite of another opinion."
+
+    With view of arrival at Golden Age all the sooner, the Court
+    determine to go by water; "and Marie de Medicis gives to her son the
+    government of the state, under the emblem of a vessel, of which he
+    holds the rudder."
+
+    This piece of royal pilotage, being on the whole the most
+    characteristic example I remember of the Mythological marine above
+    alluded to, is accordingly recommended to the reader's serious
+    attention.
+
+6. _Modern Period._ The gradual appreciation of the true character both
+of shipping and the ocean, in the works of the painters of the last half
+century, is part of that successful study of other elements of
+landscape, of which I have long labored at a consistent investigation,
+now partly laid before the public; I shall not, therefore, here enter
+into any general inquiry respecting modern sea-painting, but limit
+myself to a notice of the particular feelings which influenced Turner in
+his marine studies, so far as they are shown in the series of plates
+which have now been trusted to me for illustration.
+
+Among the earliest sketches from nature which Turner appears to have
+made, in pencil and Indian ink, when a boy of twelve or fourteen, it is
+very singular how large a proportion consists of careful studies of
+stranded boats. Now, after some fifteen years of conscientious labor,
+with the single view of acquiring knowledge of the ends and powers of
+art, I have come to one conclusion, which at the beginning of those
+fifteen years would have been very astonishing to myself--that, of all
+our modern school of landscape painters, next to Turner, and before the
+rise of the Pre-Raphaelites, the man whose works are on the whole most
+valuable, and show the highest intellect, is Samuel Prout. It is very
+notable that also in Prout's early studies, shipping subjects took not
+merely a prominent, but I think even a principal, place.
+
+The reason of this is very evident: both Turner and Prout had in them an
+untaught, inherent perception of what was great and pictorial. They
+could not find it in the buildings or in the scenes immediately around
+them. But they saw some element of real power in the boats. Prout
+afterwards found material suited to his genius in other directions, and
+left his first love; but Turner retained the early affection to the
+close of his life, and the last oil picture which he painted, before his
+noble hand forgot its cunning, was the Wreck-buoy. The last thoroughly
+perfect picture he ever painted, was the Old Temeraire.
+
+The studies which he was able to make from nature in his early years,
+are chiefly of fishing-boats, barges, and other minor marine still life;
+and his better acquaintance with this kind of shipping than with the
+larger kind is very marked in the Liber Studiorum, in which there are
+five careful studies of fishing-boats under various circumstances;
+namely, Calais Harbor, Sir John Mildmay's Picture, Flint Castle, Marine
+Dabblers, and the Calm; while of other shipping, there are only two
+subjects, both exceedingly unsatisfactory.
+
+Turner, however, deemed it necessary to his reputation at that period
+that he should paint pictures in the style of Vandevelde; and, in order
+to render the resemblance more complete, he appears to have made careful
+drawings of the different parts of old Dutch shipping. I found a large
+number of such drawings among the contents of his neglected portfolios
+at his death; some were clearly not by his own hand, others appeared to
+be transcripts by him from prints or earlier drawings; the quantity
+altogether was very great, and the evidence of his prolonged attention
+to the subject more distinct than with respect to any other element of
+landscape. Of plants, rocks, or architecture, there were very few
+careful pieces of anatomical study. But several drawers were entirely
+filled with these memoranda of shipping.
+
+In executing the series of drawings for the work known as the Southern
+Coast, Turner appears to have gained many ideas about shipping, which,
+once received, he laid up by him for use in after years. The evidence of
+this laying by of thought in his mind, as it were in reserve, until he
+had power to express it, is curious and complete throughout his life;
+and although the Southern Coast drawings are for the most part quiet in
+feeling, and remarkably simple in their mode of execution, I believe it
+was in the watch over the Cornish and Dorsetshire coast, which the
+making of those drawings involved, that he received all his noblest
+ideas about sea and ships.
+
+Of one thing I am certain; Turner never drew anything that could be
+_seen_, without having seen it. That is to say, though he would draw
+Jerusalem from some one else's sketch, it would be, nevertheless,
+entirely from his own experience of ruined walls: and though he would
+draw ancient shipping (for an imitation of Vandevelde, or a vignette to
+the voyage of Columbus) from such data as he could get about things
+which he could no more see with his own eyes, yet when, of his own free
+will, in the subject of Ilfracombe, he, in the year 1818, introduces a
+shipwreck, I am perfectly certain that, before the year 1818, he had
+_seen_ a shipwreck, and, moreover, one of that horrible kind--a ship
+dashed to pieces in deep water, at the foot of an inaccessible cliff.
+Having once seen this, I perceive, also, that the image of it could not
+be effaced from his mind. It taught him two great facts, which he never
+afterwards forgot; namely, that both ships and sea were things that
+broke to pieces. _He never afterwards painted a ship quite in fair
+order._ There is invariably a feeling about his vessels of strange awe
+and danger; the sails are in some way loosening, or flapping as if in
+fear; the swing of the hull, majestic as it may be, seems more at the
+mercy of the sea than in triumph over it; the ship never looks gay,
+never proud, only warlike and enduring. The motto he chose, in the
+Catalogue of the Academy, for the most cheerful marine he ever painted,
+the Sun of Venice going to Sea, marked the uppermost feeling in his
+mind:
+
+    "Nor heeds the Demon that in grim repose
+    Expects his evening prey."
+
+I notice above the subject of his last marine picture, the Wreck-buoy,
+and I am well persuaded that from that year 1818, when first he saw a
+ship rent asunder, he never beheld one at sea, without, in his mind's
+eye, at the same instant, seeing her skeleton.
+
+But he had seen more than the death of the ship. He had seen the sea
+feed her white flames on souls of men; and heard what a storm-gust
+sounded like, that had taken up with it, in its swirl of a moment, the
+last breaths of a ship's crew. He never forgot either the sight or the
+sound. Among the last plates prepared by his own hand for the Liber
+Studiorum, (all of them, as was likely from his advanced knowledge,
+finer than any previous pieces of the series, and most of them
+unfortunately never published, being retained beside him for some last
+touch--forever delayed,) perhaps the most important is one of the body
+of a drowned sailor, dashed against a vertical rock in the jaws of one
+merciless, immeasurable wave. He repeated the same idea, though more
+feebly expressed, later in life, in a small drawing of Grandville, on
+the coast of France. The sailor clinging to the boat in the marvelous
+drawing of Dunbar is another reminiscence of the same kind. He hardly
+ever painted a steep rocky coast without some fragment of a devoured
+ship, grinding in the blanched teeth of the surges,--just enough left to
+be a token of utter destruction. Of his two most important paintings of
+definite shipwreck I shall speak presently.
+
+I said that at this period he first was assured of another fact,
+namely, that the _Sea_ also was a thing that broke to pieces. The sea up
+to that time had been generally regarded by painters as a liquidly
+composed, level-seeking consistent thing, with a smooth surface, rising
+to a water-mark on sides of ships; in which ships were scientifically to
+be embedded, and wetted, up to said water-mark, and to remain dry above
+the same. But Turner found during his Southern Coast tour that the sea
+was _not_ this: that it was, on the contrary, a very incalculable and
+unhorizontal thing, setting its "water mark" sometimes on the highest
+heavens, as well as on sides of ships;--very breakable into pieces; half
+of a wave separable from the other half, and on the instant carriageable
+miles inland;--not in any wise limiting itself to a state of apparent
+liquidity, but now striking like a steel gauntlet, and now becoming a
+cloud, and vanishing, no eye could tell whither; one moment a flint
+cave, the next a marble pillar, the next a mere white fleece thickening
+the thundery rain. He never forgot those facts; never afterwards was
+able to recover the idea of positive distinction between sea and sky, or
+sea and land. Steel gauntlet, black rock, white cloud, and men and masts
+gnashed to pieces and disappearing in a few breaths and splinters among
+them;--a little blood on the rock angle, like red sea-weed, sponged away
+by the next splash of the foam, and the glistering granite and green
+water all pure again in vacant wrath. So stayed by him, forever, the
+Image of the Sea.
+
+One effect of this revelation of the nature of ocean to him was not a
+little singular. It seemed that ever afterwards his appreciation of the
+calmness of water was deepened by what he had witnessed of its frenzy,
+and a certain class of entirely tame subjects were treated by him even
+with increased affection after he had seen the full manifestation of
+sublimity. He had always a great regard for canal boats, and instead of
+sacrificing these old, and one would have thought unentertaining,
+friends to the deities of Storm, he seems to have returned with a
+lulling pleasure from the foam and danger of the beach to the sedgy bank
+and stealthy barge of the lowland river. Thenceforward his work which
+introduces shipping is divided into two classes; one embodying the
+poetry of silence and calmness, the other of turbulence and wrath. Of
+intermediate conditions he gives few examples; if he lets the wind down
+upon the sea at all, it is nearly always violent, and though the waves
+may not be running high, the foam is torn off them in a way which shows
+they will soon run higher. On the other hand, nothing is so perfectly
+calm as Turner's calmness. To the canal barges of England he soon added
+other types of languid motion; the broad-ruddered barks of the Loire,
+the drooping sails of Seine, the arcaded barks of the Italian lakes
+slumbering on expanse of mountain-guarded wave, the dreamy prows of
+pausing gondolas on lagoons at moon-rise; in each and all commanding an
+intensity of calm, chiefly because he never admitted an instant's
+rigidity. The surface of quiet water with other painters becomes FIXED.
+With Turner it looks as if a fairy's breath would stir it, but the
+fairy's breath is not there. So also his boats are intensely motionless,
+because intensely capable of motion. No other painter ever floated a
+boat quite rightly; all other boats stand on the water, or are fastened
+in it; only his _float_ in it. It is very difficult to trace the reasons
+of this, for the rightness of the placing on the water depends on such
+subtle curves and shadows in the floating object and its reflection,
+that in most cases the question of entirely right or entirely wrong
+resolves itself into the "estimation of an hair": and what makes the
+matter more difficult still, is, that sometimes we may see a boat drawn
+with the most studied correctness in every part, which yet will not
+swim; and sometimes we may find one drawn with many easily ascertainable
+errors, which yet swims well enough; so that the drawing of boats is
+something like the building of them, one may set off their lines by the
+most authentic rules, and yet never be sure they will sail well. It is,
+however, to be observed that Turner seemed, in those southern coast
+storms, to have been somewhat too strongly impressed by the
+disappearance of smaller crafts in surf, and was wont afterwards to give
+an uncomfortable aspect even to his gentlest seas, by burying his boats
+too deeply. When he erred, in this or other matters, it was not from
+want of pains, for of all accessories to landscape, ships were
+throughout his life those which he studied with the greatest care. His
+figures, whatever their merit or demerit, are certainly never the
+beloved part of his work; and though the architecture was in his early
+drawings careful, and continued to be so down to the Hakewell's Italy
+series, it soon became mannered and false whenever it was principal. He
+would indeed draw a ruined tower, or a distant town, incomparably better
+than any one else, and a staircase or a bit of balustrade very
+carefully; but his temples and cathedrals showed great ignorance of
+detail, and want of understanding of their character. But I am aware of
+no painting from the beginning of his life to its close, containing
+_modern_ shipping as its principal subject, in which he did not put
+forth his full strength, and pour out his knowledge of detail with a joy
+which renders those works, as a series, among the most valuable he ever
+produced. Take for instance:
+
+  1. Lord Yarborough's Shipwreck.
+  2. The Trafalgar, at Greenwich Hospital.
+  3. The Trafalgar, in his own gallery.
+  4. The Pas de Calais.
+  5. The Large Cologne.
+  6. The Havre.
+  7. The Old Temeraire.
+
+I know no fourteen pictures by Turner for which these seven might be
+wisely changed; and in all of these the shipping is thoroughly
+principal, and studied from existing ships. A large number of inferior
+works were, however, also produced by him in imitation of Vandevelde,
+representing old Dutch shipping; in these the shipping is scattered,
+scudding and distant, the sea gray and lightly broken. Such pictures
+are, generally speaking, among those of least value which he has
+produced. Two very important ones, however, belong to the imitative
+school: Lord Ellesmere's, founded on Vandevelde; and the Dort, at
+Farnley, on Cuyp. The latter, as founded on the better master, is the
+better picture, but still possesses few of the true Turner qualities,
+except his peculiar calmness, in which respect it is unrivaled; and if
+joined with Lord Yarborough's Shipwreck, the two may be considered as
+the principal symbols, in Turner's early oil paintings, of his two
+strengths in Terror and Repose. Among his drawings, shipping, as the
+principal subject, does not always constitute a work of the first class;
+nor does it so often occur. For the difficulty, in a drawing, of getting
+good color is so much less, and that of getting good form so much
+greater, than in oil, that Turner naturally threw his elaborate studies
+of ship form into oil, and made his noblest work in drawing rich in hues
+of landscape. Yet the Cowes, Devonport, and Gosport, from the England
+and Wales (the Saltash is an inferior work), united with two drawings of
+this series, Portsmouth and Sheerness, and two from Farnley, one of the
+wreck of an Indiaman, and the other of a ship of the line taking stores,
+would form a series, not indeed as attractive at first sight as many
+others, but embracing perhaps more of Turner's peculiar, unexampled, and
+unapproachable gifts than any other group of drawings which could be
+selected, the choice being confined to one class of subject.
+
+I have only to state, in conclusion, that these twelve drawings of the
+Harbors of England are more representable by engraving than most of his
+works. Few parts of them are brilliant in color; they were executed
+chiefly in brown and blue, and with more direct reference to the future
+engraving than was common with Turner. They are also small in size,
+generally of the exact dimensions of the plate, and therefore the lines
+of the compositions are not spoiled by contraction; while finally, the
+touch of the painter's hand upon the wave-surface is far better imitated
+by mezzotint engraving than by any of the ordinary expedients of line.
+Take them all in all, they form the most valuable series of marine
+studies which have as yet been published from his works; and I hope
+that they may be of some use hereafter in recalling the ordinary aspect
+of our English seas, at the exact period when the nation had done its
+utmost in the wooden and woven strength of ships, and had most perfectly
+fulfilled the old and noble prophecy--
+
+                "They shall ride
+                Over ocean wide,
+    With hempen bridle, and horse of tree."
+                        _Thomas of Ercildoune._
+
+
+
+
+I.--DOVER.
+
+[Illustration: DOVER.]
+
+
+This port has some right to take precedence of others, as being that
+assuredly which first exercises the hospitality of England to the
+majority of strangers who set foot on her shores. I place it first
+therefore among our present subjects; though the drawing itself, and
+chiefly on account of its manifestation of Turner's faulty habit of
+local exaggeration, deserves no such pre-eminence. He always painted,
+not the place itself, but his impression of it, and this on steady
+principle; leaving to inferior artists the task of topographical detail;
+and he was right in this principle, as I have shown elsewhere, when the
+impression was a genuine one; but in the present case it is not so. He
+has lost the real character of Dover Cliffs by making the town at their
+feet three times lower in proportionate height than it really is; nor is
+he to be justified in giving the barracks, which appear on the left
+hand, more the air of a hospice on the top of an Alpine precipice, than
+of an establishment which, out of Snargate street, can be reached,
+without drawing breath, by a winding stair of some 170 steps; making the
+slope beside them more like the side of Skiddaw than what it really is,
+the earthwork of an unimportant battery.
+
+This design is also remarkable as an instance of that restlessness which
+was above noticed even in Turner's least stormy seas. There is nothing
+tremendous here in scale of wave, but the whole surface is fretted and
+disquieted by torturing wind; an effect which was always increased
+during the progress of the subjects, by Turner's habit of scratching out
+small sparkling lights, in order to make the plate "bright," or
+"lively."[Q] In a general way the engravers used to like this, and,
+as far as they were able, would tempt Turner farther into the practice,
+which was precisely equivalent to that of supplying the place of healthy
+and heart-whole cheerfulness by dram-drinking.
+
+    [Q] See the farther explanation of this practice in the notice of
+    the subject of "Portsmouth."
+
+The two sea-gulls in the front of the picture were additions of this
+kind, and are very injurious, confusing the organization and concealing
+the power of the sea. The merits of the drawing are, however, still
+great as a piece of composition. The left-hand side is most interesting,
+and characteristic of Turner: no other artist would have put the round
+pier so exactly under the round cliff. It is under it so accurately,
+that if the nearly vertical falling line of that cliff be continued, it
+strikes the sea-base of the pier to a hair's breadth. But Turner knew
+better than any man the value of echo, as well as of contrast,--of
+repetition, as well as of opposition. The round pier repeats the line of
+the main cliff, and then the sail repeats the diagonal shadow which
+crosses it, and emerges above it just as the embankment does above the
+cliff brow. Lower, come the opposing curves in the two boats, the whole
+forming one group of sequent lines up the whole side of the picture. The
+rest of the composition is more commonplace than is usual with the great
+master; but there are beautiful transitions of light and shade between
+the sails of the little fishing-boat, the brig behind her, and the
+cliffs. Note how dexterously the two front sails[R] of the brig are
+brought on the top of the white sail of the fishing-boat to help to
+detach it from the white cliffs.
+
+    [R] I think I shall be generally more intelligible by explaining
+    what I mean in this way, and run less chance of making myself
+    ridiculous in the eyes of sensible people, than by displaying the
+    very small nautical knowledge I possess. My sailor friends will
+    perhaps be gracious enough to believe that I _could_ call these
+    sails by their right names if I liked.
+
+
+
+
+II.--RAMSGATE.
+
+[Illustration: RAMSGATE.]
+
+
+This, though less attractive, at first sight, than the former plate, is
+a better example of the master, and far truer and nobler as a piece of
+thought. The lifting of the brig on the wave is very daring; just one of
+the things which is seen in every gale, but which no other painter than
+Turner ever represented; and the lurid transparency of the dark sky, and
+wild expression of wind in the fluttering of the falling sails of the
+vessel running into the harbor, are as fine as anything of the kind he
+has done. There is great grace in the drawing of this latter vessel:
+note the delicate switch forward of her upper mast.
+
+There is a very singular point connected with the composition of this
+drawing, proving it (as from internal evidence was most likely) to be a
+record of a thing actually seen. Three years before the date of this
+engraving Turner had made a drawing of Ramsgate for the Southern Coast
+series. That drawing represents the _same day_, the _same moment_, and
+the _same ships_, from a different point of view. It supposes the
+spectator placed in a boat some distance out at sea, beyond the
+fishing-boats on the left in the present plate, and looking towards the
+town, or into the harbor. The brig, which is near us here, is then, of
+course, in the distance on the right; the schooner entering the harbor,
+and, in both plates, lowering her fore-topsail, is, of course, seen
+foreshortened; the fishing-boats only are a little different in position
+and set of sail. The sky is precisely the same, only a dark piece of it,
+which is too far to the right to be included in _this_ view, enters into
+the wider distance of the other, and the town, of course, becomes a more
+important object.
+
+The persistence in one conception furnishes evidence of the very
+highest imaginative power. On a common mind, what it has seen is so
+feebly impressed, that it mixes other ideas with it immediately; forgets
+it--modifies it--adorns it,--does anything but keep _hold_ of it. But
+when Turner had once seen that stormy hour at Ramsgate harbor-mouth, he
+never quitted his grasp of it. He had _seen_ the two vessels; one go in,
+the other out. He could have only seen them at that one moment--from one
+point; but the impression on his imagination is so strong, that he is
+able to handle it three years afterwards, as if it were a real thing,
+and turn it round on the table of his brain, and look at it from the
+other corner. He will see the brig near, instead of far off: set the
+whole sea and sky so many points round to the south, and see how they
+look, so. I never traced power of this kind in any other man.
+
+
+
+
+III.--PLYMOUTH.
+
+[Illustration: PLYMOUTH.]
+
+
+The drawing for this plate is one of Turner's most remarkable, though
+not most meritorious, works: it contains the brightest rainbow he ever
+painted, to my knowledge; not the best, but the most dazzling. It has
+been much modified in the plate. It is very like one of Turner's pieces
+of caprice to introduce a rainbow at all as a principal feature in such
+a scene; for it is not through the colors of the iris that we generally
+expect to be shown eighteen-pounder batteries and ninety-gun ships.
+
+Whether he meant the dark cloud (intensely dark blue in the original
+drawing), with the sunshine pursuing it back into distance; and the
+rainbow, with its base set on a ship of battle, to be together types of
+war and peace, and of the one as the foundation of the other, I leave it
+to the reader to decide. My own impression is, that although Turner
+might have some askance symbolism in his mind, the present design is,
+like the former one, in many points a simple reminiscence of a seen
+fact.[S]
+
+    [S] I have discovered, since this was written, that the design was
+    made from a vigorous and interesting sketch by Mr. S. Cousins, in
+    which the rainbow and most of the ships are already in their places.
+    Turner was, therefore, in this case, as I have found him in several
+    other instances, realizing, not a fact seen by himself, but a fact
+    as he supposed it to have been seen by another.
+
+However, whether reminiscent or symbolic, the design is, to my mind, an
+exceedingly unsatisfactory one, owing to its total want of principal
+subject. The fort ceases to be of importance because of the bank and
+tower in front of it; the ships, necessarily for the effect, but fatally
+for themselves, are confused, and incompletely drawn, except the little
+sloop, which looks paltry and like a toy; and the foreground objects
+are, for work of Turner, curiously ungraceful and uninteresting.
+
+It is possible, however, that to some minds the fresh and dewy space of
+darkness, so animated with latent human power, may give a sensation of
+great pleasure, and at all events the design is worth study on account
+of its very strangeness.
+
+
+
+
+IV.--CATWATER.
+
+[Illustration: CATWATER.]
+
+
+I have placed in the middle of the series those pictures which I think
+least interesting, though the want of interest is owing more to the
+monotony of their character than to any real deficiency in their
+subjects. If, after contemplating paintings of arid deserts or glowing
+sunsets, we had come suddenly upon this breezy entrance to the crowded
+cove of Plymouth, it would have gladdened our hearts to purpose; but
+having already been at sea for some time, there is little in this
+drawing to produce renewal of pleasurable impression: only one useful
+thought may be gathered from the very feeling of monotony. At the time
+when Turner executed these drawings, his portfolios were full of the
+most magnificent subjects--coast and inland,--gathered from all the
+noblest scenery of France and Italy. He was ready to realize these
+sketches for any one who would have asked it of him, but no consistent
+effort was ever made to call forth his powers; and the only means by
+which it was thought that the public patronage could be secured for a
+work of this kind, was by keeping familiar names before the eye, and
+awakening the so-called "patriotic," but in reality narrow and selfish,
+associations belonging to well-known towns or watering-places. It is to
+be hoped, that when a great landscape painter appears among us again, we
+may know better how to employ him, and set him to paint for us things
+which are less easily seen, and which are somewhat better worth seeing,
+than the mists of the Catwater, or terraces of Margate.
+
+
+
+
+V.--SHEERNESS.
+
+[Illustration: SHEERNESS.]
+
+
+I look upon this as one of the noblest sea-pieces which Turner ever
+produced. It has not his usual fault of over-crowding or over-glitter;
+the objects in it are few and noble, and the space infinite. The sky is
+quite one of his best: not violently black, but full of gloom and power;
+the complicated roundings of its volumes behind the sloop's mast, and
+downwards to the left, have been rendered by the engraver with notable
+success; and the dim light entering along the horizon, full of rain,
+behind the ship of war, is true and grand in the highest degree. By
+comparing it with the extreme darkness of the skies in the Plymouth,
+Dover, and Ramsgate, the reader will see how much more majesty there is
+in moderation than in extravagance, and how much more darkness, as far
+as sky is concerned, there is in gray than in black. It is not that the
+Plymouth and Dover skies are false,--such impenetrable forms of
+thunder-cloud are amongst the commonest phenomena of storm; but they
+have more of spent flash and past shower in them than the less
+passionate, but more truly stormy and threatening, volumes of the sky
+here. The Plymouth storm will very thoroughly wet the sails, and wash
+the decks, of the ships at anchor, but will send nothing to the bottom.
+For these pale and lurid masses, there is no saying what evil they may
+have in their thoughts, or what they may have to answer for before
+night. The ship of war in the distance is one of many instances of
+Turner's dislike to draw _complete_ rigging; and this not only because
+he chose to give an idea of his ships having seen rough service, and
+being crippled; but also because in men-of-war he liked the mass of the
+hull to be increased in apparent weight and size by want of upper spars.
+All artists of any rank share this last feeling. Stanfield never makes
+a careful study of a hull without shaking some or all of its masts out
+of it first, if possible. See, in the Coast Scenery, Portsmouth harbor,
+Falmouth, Hamoaze, and Rye old harbors; and compare, among Turner's
+works, the near hulls in the Devonport, Saltash, and Castle Upnor, and
+distance of Gosport. The fact is, partly that the precision of line in
+the complete spars of a man-of-war is too formal to come well into
+pictorial arrangements, and partly that the chief glory of a ship of the
+line is in its aspect of being "one that hath had losses."
+
+The subtle varieties of curve in the drawing of the sails of the near
+sloop are altogether exquisite; as well as the contrast of her black and
+glistering side with those sails, and with the sea. Examine the wayward
+and delicate play of the dancing waves along her flank, and between her
+and the brig in ballast, plunging slowly before the wind; I have not
+often seen anything so perfect in fancy, or in execution of engraving.
+
+The heaving and black buoy in the near sea is one of Turner's "echoes,"
+repeating, with slight change, the head of the sloop with its flash of
+luster. The chief aim of this buoy is, however, to give comparative
+lightness to the shadowed part of the sea, which is, indeed, somewhat
+overcharged in darkness, and would have been felt to be so, but for this
+contrasting mass. Hide it with the hand, and this will be immediately
+felt. There is only one other of Turner's works which, in its way, can
+be matched with this drawing, namely, the Mouth of the Humber in the
+River Scenery. The latter is, on the whole, the finer picture; but this
+by much the more interesting in the shipping.
+
+
+
+
+VI.--MARGATE.
+
+[Illustration: MARGATE.]
+
+
+This plate is not, at first sight, one of the most striking of the
+series; but it is very beautiful, and highly characteristic of
+Turner.[T] First, in its choice of subjects: for it seems very notably
+capricious in a painter eminently capable of rendering scenes of
+sublimity and mystery, to devote himself to the delineation of one of
+the most prosaic of English watering-places--not once or twice, but in a
+series of elaborate drawings, of which this is the fourth. The first
+appeared in the Southern Coast series, and was followed by an elaborate
+drawing on a large scale, with a beautiful sunrise; then came another
+careful and very beautiful drawing in the England and Wales series; and
+finally this, which is a sort of poetical abstract of the first. Now, if
+we enumerate the English ports one by one, from Berwick to Whitehaven,
+round the island, there will hardly be found another so utterly devoid
+of all picturesque or romantic interest as Margate. Nearly all have some
+steep eminence of down or cliff, some pretty retiring dingle, some
+roughness of old harbor or straggling fisher-hamlet, some fragment of
+castle or abbey on the heights above, capable of becoming a leading
+point in a picture; but Margate is simply a mass of modern parades and
+streets, with a little bit of chalk cliff, an orderly pier, and some
+bathing-machines. Turner never conceives it as anything else; and yet
+for the sake of this simple vision, again and again he quits all higher
+thoughts. The beautiful bays of Northern Devon and Cornwall he never
+painted but once, and that very imperfectly. The finest subjects of the
+Southern Coast series--the Minehead, Clovelly, Ilfracombe, Watchet,
+East and West Looe, Tintagel, Boscastle--he never touched again; but he
+repeated Ramsgate, Deal, Dover, and Margate, I know not how often.
+
+    [T] It was left unfinished at his death, and I would not allow it to
+    be touched afterwards, desiring that the series should remain as far
+    as possible in an authentic state.
+
+Whether his desire for popularity, which, in spite of his occasional
+rough defiances of public opinion, was always great, led him to the
+selection of those subjects which he thought might meet with most
+acceptance from a large class of the London public, or whether he had
+himself more pleasurable associations connected with these places than
+with others, I know not; but the fact of the choice itself is a very
+mournful one, considered with respect to the future interests of art.
+There is only this one point to be remembered, as tending to lessen our
+regret, that it is possible Turner might have felt the necessity of
+compelling himself sometimes to dwell on the most familiar and prosaic
+scenery, in order to prevent his becoming so much accustomed to that of
+a higher class as to diminish his enthusiasm in its presence. Into this
+probability I shall have occasion to examine at greater length
+hereafter.
+
+The plate of Margate now before us is nearly as complete a duplicate of
+the Southern Coast view as the previous plate is of that of Ramsgate;
+with this difference, that the position of the spectator is here the
+same, but the class of ship is altered, though the ship remains
+precisely in the same spot. A piece of old wreck, which was rather an
+important object to the left of the other drawing, is here removed. The
+figures are employed in the same manner in both designs.
+
+The details of the houses of the town are executed in the original
+drawing with a precision which adds almost painfully to their natural
+formality. It is certainly provoking to find the great painter, who
+often only deigns to bestow on some Rhenish fortress or French city,
+crested with Gothic towers, a few misty and indistinguishable touches of
+his brush, setting himself to indicate, with unerring toil, every
+separate square window in the parades, hotels, and circulating libraries
+of an English bathing-place.
+
+The whole of the drawing is well executed, and free from fault or
+affectation, except perhaps in the somewhat confused curlings of the
+near sea. I had much rather have seen it breaking in the usual
+straightforward way. The brilliant white of the piece of chalk cliff is
+evidently one of the principal aims of the composition. In the drawing
+the sea is throughout of a dark fresh blue, the sky grayish blue, and
+the grass on the top of the cliffs a little sunburnt, the cliffs
+themselves being left in the almost untouched white of the paper.
+
+
+
+
+VII.--PORTSMOUTH.
+
+[Illustration: PORTSMOUTH.]
+
+
+This beautiful drawing is a _third_ recurrence by Turner to his earliest
+impression of Portsmouth, given in the Southern Coast series. The
+buildings introduced differ only by a slight turn of the spectator
+towards the right; the buoy is in the same spot; the man-of-war's boat
+nearly so; the sloop exactly so, but on a different tack; and the
+man-of-war, which is far off to the left at anchor in the Southern Coast
+view, is here nearer, and getting up her anchor.
+
+The idea had previously passed through one phase of greater change, in
+his drawing of "Gosport" for the England, in which, while the sky of the
+Southern Coast view was almost cloud for cloud retained, the interest of
+the distant ships of the line had been divided with a collier brig and a
+fast-sailing boat. In the present view he returns to his early thought,
+dwelling, however, now with chief insistence on the ship of the line,
+which is certainly the most majestic of all that he has introduced in
+his drawings.
+
+It is also a very curious instance of that habit of Turner's before
+referred to (p. 27), of never painting a ship quite in good order. On
+showing this plate the other day to a naval officer, he complained of
+it, first that "the jib[U] would not be wanted with the wind blowing out
+of harbor," and, secondly, that "a man-of-war would never have her
+foretop-gallant sail set, and her main and mizzen top-gallants
+furled:--all the men would be on the yards at once."
+
+    [U] The sail seen, edge on, like a white sword, at the head of the
+    ship.
+
+I believe this criticism to be perfectly just, though it has happened to
+me, very singularly, whenever I have had the opportunity of making
+complete inquiry into any technical matter of this kind, respecting
+which some professional person had blamed Turner, that I have always
+found, in the end, Turner was right, and the professional critic wrong,
+owing to some want of allowance for possible accidents, and for
+necessary modes of pictorial representation. Still, this cannot be the
+case in every instance; and supposing my sailor informant to be
+perfectly right in the present one, the disorderliness of the way in
+which this ship is represented as setting her sails, gives us farther
+proof of the imperative instinct in the artist's mind, refusing to
+contemplate a ship, even in her proudest moments, but as in some way
+over-mastered by the strengths of chance and storm.
+
+The wave on the left hand beneath the buoy, presents a most interesting
+example of the way in which Turner used to spoil his work by retouching.
+All his truly fine drawings are either done quickly, or at all events
+straight forward, without alteration: he never, as far as I have
+examined his works hitherto, altered but to destroy. When he saw a plate
+look somewhat dead or heavy, as, compared with the drawing, it was
+almost sure at first to do, he used to scratch out little lights all
+over it, and make it "sparkling"; a process in which the engravers
+almost unanimously delighted,[V] and over the impossibility of which
+they now mourn, declaring it to be hopeless to engrave after Turner,
+since he cannot now scratch their plates for them. It is quite true that
+these small lights were always placed beautifully; and though the plate,
+after its "touching," generally looked as if ingeniously salted out of
+her dredging-box by an artistical cook, the salting was done with a
+spirit which no one else can now imitate. But the original power of the
+work was forever destroyed. If the reader will look carefully beneath
+the white touches on the left in this sea, he will discern dimly the
+form of a round nodding hollow breaker. This in the early state of the
+plate is a gaunt, dark, angry wave, rising at the shoal indicated by the
+buoy;--Mr. Lupton has fac-similed with so singular skill the scratches
+of the penknife by which Turner afterwards disguised this breaker, and
+spoiled his picture, that the plate in its present state is almost as
+interesting as the touched proof itself; interesting, however, only as a
+warning to all artists never to lose hold of their first conception.
+They may tire even of what is exquisitely right, as they work it out,
+and their only safety is in the self-denial of calm completion.
+
+    [V] Not, let me say with all due honor to him, the careful and
+    skillful engraver of these plates, who has been much more tormented
+    than helped by Turner's alterations.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.--FALMOUTH.
+
+[Illustration: FALMOUTH.]
+
+
+This is one of the most beautiful and best-finished plates of the
+series, and Turner has taken great pains with the drawing; but it is
+sadly open to the same charges which were brought against the Dover, of
+an attempt to reach a false sublimity by magnifying things in themselves
+insignificant. The fact is that Turner, when he prepared these drawings,
+had been newly inspired by the scenery of the Continent; and with his
+mind entirely occupied by the ruined towers of the Rhine, he found
+himself called upon to return to the formal embrasures and unappalling
+elevations of English forts and hills. But it was impossible for him to
+recover the simplicity and narrowness of conception in which he had
+executed the drawing of the Southern Coast, or to regain the innocence
+of delight with which he had once assisted gravely at the drying of
+clothes over the limekiln at Comb Martin, or penciled the woodland
+outlines of the banks of Dartmouth Cove. In certain fits of prosaic
+humorism, he would, as we have seen, condemn himself to delineation of
+the parades of a watering-place; but the moment he permitted himself to
+be enthusiastic, vaster imaginations crowded in upon him: to modify his
+old conception in the least, was to exaggerate it; the mount of
+Pendennis is lifted into rivalship with Ehrenbreitstein, and hardworked
+Falmouth glitters along the distant bay, like the gay magnificence of
+Resina or Sorrento.
+
+This effort at sublimity is all the more to be regretted, because it
+never succeeds completely. Shade, or magnify, or mystify as he may, even
+Turner cannot make the minute neatness of the English fort appeal to us
+as forcibly as the remnants of Gothic wall and tower that crown the
+Continental crags; and invest them as he may with smoke or sunbeam, the
+details of our little mounded hills will not take the rank of cliffs of
+Alp, or promontories of Apennine; and we lose the English simplicity,
+without gaining the Continental nobleness.
+
+I have also a prejudice against this picture for being disagreeably
+noisy. Wherever there is something serious to be done, as in a battle
+piece, the noise becomes an element of the sublimity; but to have great
+guns going off in every direction beneath one's feet on the right, and
+all round the other side of the castle, and from the deck of the ship of
+the line, and from the battery far down the cove, and from the fort on
+the top of the hill, and all for nothing, is to my mind eminently
+troublesome.
+
+The drawing of the different wreaths and depths of smoke, and the
+explosive look of the flash on the right, are, however, very wonderful
+and peculiarly Turneresque; the sky is also beautiful in form, and the
+foreground, in which we find his old regard for washerwomen has not
+quite deserted him, singularly skillful. It is curious how formal the
+whole picture becomes if this figure and the gray stones beside it are
+hidden with the hand.
+
+
+
+
+IX.--SIDMOUTH.
+
+[Illustration: SIDMOUTH.]
+
+
+This drawing has always been interesting to me among Turner's sea
+pieces, on account of the noble gathering together of the great wave on
+the left,--the back of a breaker, just heaving itself up, and provoking
+itself into passion, before its leap and roar against the beach. But the
+enjoyment of these designs is much interfered with by their monotony: it
+is seriously to be regretted that in all but one the view is taken from
+the sea; for the spectator is necessarily tired by the perpetual rush
+and sparkle of water, and ceases to be impressed by it. It would be
+felt, if this plate were seen alone, that there are few marine paintings
+in which the weight and heaping of the sea are given so faithfully.
+
+For the rest it is perhaps more to be regretted that we are kept to our
+sea-level at Sidmouth than at any other of the localities illustrated.
+What claim the pretty little village has to be considered as a port of
+England, I know not; but if it was to be so ranked, a far more
+interesting study of it might have been made from the heights above the
+town, whence the ranges of dark-red sandstone cliffs stretching to the
+southwest are singularly bold and varied. The detached fragment of
+sandstone which forms the principal object in Turner's view has long ago
+fallen, and even while it stood could hardly have been worth the honor
+of so careful illustration.
+
+
+
+
+X.--WHITBY.
+
+[Illustration: WHITBY.]
+
+
+As an expression of the general spirit of English coast scenery, this
+plate must be considered the principal one of the series. Like all the
+rest, it is a little too grand for its subject; but the exaggerations of
+space and size are more allowable here than in the others, as partly
+necessary to convey the feeling of danger conquered by activity and
+commerce, which characterizes all our northerly Eastern coast. There are
+cliffs more terrible, and winds more wild, on other shores; but nowhere
+else do so many white sails lean against the bleak wind, and glide
+across the cliff shadows. Nor do I know many other memorials of monastic
+life so striking as the abbey on that dark headland. We are apt in our
+journeys through lowland England, to watch with some secret contempt the
+general pleasantness of the vales in which our abbeys were founded,
+without taking any pains to inquire into the particular circumstances
+which directed or compelled the choice of the monks, and without
+reflecting that, if the choice were a selfish one, the selfishness is
+that of the English lowlander turning monk, not that of monachism;
+since, if we examine the sites of the Swiss monasteries and convents, we
+shall always find the snow lying round them in July; and it must have
+been cold meditating in these cloisters of St. Hilda's when the winter
+wind set from the east. It is long since I was at Whitby, and I am not
+sure whether Turner is right in giving so monotonous and severe
+verticality to the cliff above which the abbey stands; but I believe it
+must have some steep places about it, since the tradition which, in
+nearly all parts of the island where fossil ammonites are found, is sure
+to be current respecting them, takes quite an original form at Whitby,
+owing to the steepness of this rock. In general, the saint of the
+locality has simply turned all the serpents to stone; but at Whitby, St.
+Hilda drove them over the cliff, and the serpents, before being
+petrified, had all their heads broken off by the fall!
+
+
+
+
+XI.--DEAL.
+
+[Illustration: DEAL.]
+
+
+I have had occasion,[W] elsewhere, to consider at some length, the
+peculiar love of the English for neatness and minuteness: but I have
+only considered, without accounting for, or coming to any conclusion
+about it; and, the more I think of it, the more it puzzles me to
+understand what there can be in our great national mind which delights
+to such an extent in brass plates, red bricks, square curbstones, and
+fresh green paint, all on the tiniest possible scale. The other day I
+was dining in a respectable English "Inn and Posting-house," not ten
+miles from London, and, measuring the room after dinner, I found it
+exactly twice and a quarter the height of my umbrella. It was a highly
+comfortable room, and associated, in the proper English manner, with
+outdoor sports and pastimes, by a portrait of Jack Hall, fisherman of
+Eton, and of Mr. C. Davis on his favorite mare; but why all this hunting
+and fishing enthusiasm should like to reduce itself, at home, into twice
+and a quarter the height of an umbrella, I could not in any wise then,
+nor have I at any other time been able to ascertain.
+
+    [W] _Modern Painters_, vol. iv. chap. 1.
+
+Perhaps the town of Deal involves as much of this question in its aspect
+and reputation, as any other place in Her Majesty's dominions: or at
+least it seemed so to me, coming to it as I did, after having been
+accustomed to the boat-life at Venice, where the heavy craft, massy in
+build and massy in sail, and disorderly in aquatic economy, reach with
+their mast-vanes only to the first stories of the huge marble palaces
+they anchor among. It was very strange to me, after this, knowing that
+whatever was brave and strong in the English sailor was concentrated in
+our Deal boatmen, to walk along that trim strip of conventional
+beach, which the sea itself seems to wash in a methodical manner, one
+shingle-step at a time; and by its thin toy-like boats, each with its
+head to sea, at regular intervals, looking like things that one would
+give a clever boy to play with in a pond, when first he got past
+petticoats; and the row of lath cots behind, all tidiness and telegraph,
+looking as if the whole business of the human race on earth was to know
+what o'clock it was, and when it would be high water,--only some slight
+weakness in favor of grog being indicated here and there by a
+hospitable-looking open door, a gay bow-window, and a sign intimating
+that it is a sailor's duty to be not only accurate, but "jolly."
+
+Turner was always fond of this neat, courageous, benevolent, merry,
+methodical Deal. He painted it very early, in the Southern Coast series,
+insisting on one of the tavern windows as the principal subject, with a
+flash of forked lightning streaming beyond it out at sea like a narrow
+flag. He has the same association in his mind in the present plate;
+disorder and distress among the ships on the left, with the boat going
+out to help them; and the precision of the little town stretching in
+sunshine along the beach.
+
+
+
+
+XII.--SCARBOROUGH.
+
+[Illustration: SCARBOROUGH.]
+
+
+I have put this plate last in the series, thinking that the reader will
+be glad to rest in its morning quietness, after so much tossing among
+the troubled foam. I said in the course of the introduction, that
+nothing is so perfectly calm as Turner's calmness; and I know very few
+better examples of this calmness than the plate before us, uniting, as
+it does, the glittering of the morning clouds, and trembling of the sea,
+with an infinitude of peace in both. There are one or two points of
+interest in the artifices by which the intense effect of calm is
+produced. Much is owing, in the first place, to the amount of absolute
+gloom obtained by the local blackness of the boats on the beach; like a
+piece of the midnight left unbroken by the dawn. But more is owing to
+the treatment of the distant harbor mouth. In general, throughout
+nature, Reflection and Repetition are _peaceful_ things; that is to say,
+the image of any object, seen in calm water, gives us an impression of
+quietness, not merely because we know the water must be quiet in order
+to be reflective; but because the fact of the repetition of this form is
+lulling to us in its monotony, and associated more or less with an idea
+of quiet succession, or reproduction, in events or things throughout
+nature:--that one day should be like another day, one town the image of
+another town, or one history the repetition of another history, being
+more or less results of quietness, while dissimilarity and
+non-succession are also, more or less, results of interference and
+disquietude. And thus, though an echo actually increases the quantity of
+sound heard, its repetition of the notes or syllables of sound, gives an
+idea of calmness attainable in no other way; hence the feeling of
+calm given to a landscape by the notes of the cuckoo. Understanding
+this, observe the anxious _doubling_ of every object by a visible echo
+or shadow throughout this picture. The grandest feature of it is the
+steep distant cliff; and therefore the dualism is more marked here than
+elsewhere; the two promontories or cliffs, and two piers below them,
+being arranged so that the one looks almost like the shadow of the
+other, cast irregularly on mist. In all probability, the more distant
+pier would in reality, unless it is very greatly higher than the near
+one, have been lowered by perspective so as not to continue in the same
+longitudinal line at the top,--but Turner will not have it so; he
+reduces them to exactly the same level, so that the one looks like the
+phantom of the other; and so of the cliffs above.
+
+Then observe, each pier has, just below the head of it, in a vertical
+line, another important object, one a buoy, and the other a stooping
+figure. These carry on the double group in the calmest way, obeying the
+general law of vertical reflection, and throw down two long shadows on
+the near beach. The intenseness of the parallelism would catch the eye
+in a moment, but for the lighthouse, which breaks the group and prevents
+the artifice from being too open. Next come the two heads of boats, with
+their two bowsprits, and the two masts of the one farthest off, all
+monotonously double, but for the diagonal mast of the nearer one, which
+again hides the artifice. Next, put your finger over the white central
+figure, and follow the minor incidents round the beach; first, under the
+lighthouse, a stick, with its echo below a little to the right; above, a
+black stone, and its echo to the right; under the white figure, another
+stick, with its echo to the left; then a starfish,[X] and a white spot
+its echo to the left; then a dog, and a basket to double its light;
+above, a fisherman, and his wife for an echo; above them, two lines of
+curved shingle; above them, two small black figures; above them, two
+unfinished ships, and two forked masts; above the forked masts, a house
+with two gables, and its echo exactly over it in two gables more; next
+to the right, two fishing-boats with sails down; farther on, two
+fishing-boats with sails up, each with its little white reflection
+below; then two larger ships, which, lest his trick should be found out,
+Turner puts a dim third between; then below, two fat colliers, leaning
+away from each other, and two thinner colliers, leaning towards each
+other; and now at last, having doubled everything all round the beach,
+he gives one strong single stroke to gather all together, places his
+solitary central white figure, and the Calm is complete.
+
+    [X] I have mentioned elsewhere that Turner was fond of this subject
+    of Scarborough, and that there are four drawings of it by him, if
+    not more, under different effects, having this much common to the
+    four, that there is always a starfish on the beach.
+
+It is also to be noticed, that not only the definite repetition has a
+power of expressing serenity, but even the slight sense of _confusion_
+induced by the continual doubling is useful; it makes us feel not well
+awake, drowsy, and as if we were out too early, and had to rub our eyes
+yet a little, before we could make out whether there were really two
+boats or one.
+
+I do not mean that every means which we may possibly take to enable
+ourselves to see things double, will be always the most likely to insure
+the ultimate tranquillity of the scene, neither that any such artifice
+as this would be of avail, without the tender and loving drawing of the
+things themselves, and of the light that bathes them; nevertheless the
+highest art is full of these little cunnings, and it is only by the help
+of them that it can succeed in at all equaling the force of the natural
+impression.
+
+One great monotony, that of the successive sigh and vanishing of the
+slow waves upon the sand, no art can render to us. Perhaps the silence
+of early light, even on the "field dew consecrate" of the grass itself,
+is not so tender as the lisp of the sweet belled lips of the clear waves
+in their following patience. We will leave the shore as their silver
+fringes fade upon it, desiring thus, as far as may be, to remember the
+sea. We have regarded it perhaps too often as an enemy to be subdued;
+let us, at least this once, accept from it, and from the soft light
+beyond the cliffs above, the image of the state of a perfect Human
+Spirit,--
+
+    "The memory, like a cloudless air,
+    The conscience, like a sea at rest."
+
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Note                                           |
+  |                                                              |
+  | There was one instance each of 'sea-shell' and 'seashell'.   |
+  | These have not been changed.                                 |
+  |                                                              |
+  | One instance of the 'oe' ligature has been transcribed as    |
+  | oe.                                                          |
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Harbours of England, by John Ruskin
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