cknowledge the virtue of this distance as a part of the great
composition, to be on our guard against the license it assumes and the
attractiveness of its overcharged color. Fragments of far purer truth
occur in the works of Tintoret; and in the drawing of foliage, whether
rapid or elaborate, of masses or details, the Venetian painters, taken
as a body, may be considered almost faultless models. But the whole
field of what they have done is so narrow, and therein is so much of
what is only relatively right, and in itself false or imperfect, that
the young and inexperienced painter could run no greater risk than the
too early taking them for teachers; and to the general spectator their
landscape is valuable rather as a means of peculiar and solemn emotion
than as ministering to, or inspiring the universal love of nature. Hence
while men of serious mind, especially those whose pursuits have brought
them into continued relations with the peopled rather than the lonely
world, will always look to the Venetian painters as having touched those
simple chords of landscape harmony which are most in unison with earnest
and melancholy feeling; those whose philosophy is more cheerful and more
extended, as having been trained and colored among simple and solitary
nature, will seek for a wider and more systematic circle of teaching:
they may grant that the barred horizontal gloom of the Titian sky, and
the massy leaves of the Titian forest are among the most sublime of the
conceivable forms of material things; but they know that the virtue of
these very forms is to be learned only by right comparison of them with
the cheerfulness, fulness and comparative inquietness of other hours and
scenes; that they are not intended for the continual food, but the
occasional soothing of the human heart; that there is a lesson of not
less value in its place, though of less concluding and sealing
authority, in every one of the more humble phases of material things:
and that there are some lessons of equal or greater authority which
these masters neither taught nor received. And until the school of
modern landscape arose Art had never noted the links of this mighty
chain; it mattered not that a fragment lay here and there, no heavenly
lightning could descend by it; the landscape of the Venetians was
without effect on any contemporary in subsequent schools; it still
remains on the continent as useless as if it had never existed; and at
this moment German