eing that what
appears to be meant for vegetation upon them, amounts to nothing more
than a green stain on their surfaces, the more evidently false because
the leaves of the trees twenty yards farther off are all perfectly
visible and distinct; and that the sharp lines with which each cuts
against that beyond it, are not only such as crumbling earth could never
show or assume, but are maintained through their whole progress
ungraduated, unchanging, and unaffected by any of the circumstances of
varying shade to which every one of nature's lines is inevitably
subjected. In fact, the whole arrangement is the impotent struggle of a
tyro to express, by successive edges, that approach of earth which he
finds himself incapable of expressing by the drawing of the surface.
Claude wished to make you understand that the edge of his pond came
nearer and nearer: he had probably often tried to do this with an
unbroken bank, or a bank only varied by the delicate and harmonized
anatomy of nature; and he had found that owing to his total ignorance of
the laws of perspective, such efforts on his part invariably ended in
his reducing his pond to the form of a round O, and making it look
perpendicular. Much comfort and solace of mind, in such unpleasant
circumstances, may be derived from instantly dividing the obnoxious bank
into a number of successive promontories, and developing their edges
with completeness and intensity. Every school-girl's drawing, as soon as
her mind has arrived at so great a degree of enlightenment as to
perceive that perpendicular water is objectionable, will supply us with
edifying instances of this unfailing resource; and this foreground of
Claude's is only one out of the thousand cases in which he has been
reduced to it. And if it be asked, how the proceeding differs from that
of nature, I have only to point to nature herself, as she is drawn in
the foreground of Turner's Mercury and Argus, a case precisely similar
to Claude's, of earthy crumbling banks cut away by water. It will be
found in this picture (and I am now describing nature's work and
Turner's with the same words) that the whole distance is given by
retirement of solid surface; and that if ever an edge is expressed, it
is only felt for an instant, and then lost again; so that the eye cannot
stop at it and prepare for a long jump to another like it, but is guided
over it, and round it, into the hollow beyond; and thus the whole
receding mass of ground,