ght of waves thrown loose; and so Canaletto is still
thought to have painted canals, and Vandevelde and Backhuysen to have
painted sea, and the uninterpreted streams and maligned sea hiss shame
upon us from all their rocky beds and hollow shores.

Sec. 5. Difficulty of treating this part of the subject.

I approach this part of my subject with more despondency than any other,
and that for several reasons; first, the water painting of all the elder
landscape painters, excepting a few of the better passages of Claude and
Ruysdael, is so execrable, so beyond all expression and explanation bad;
Claude's and Ruysdael's best so cold and valueless, that I do not know
how to address those who like such painting; I do not know what their
sensations are respecting sea. I can perceive nothing in Vandevelde or
Backhuysen of the lowest redeeming merit; no power, no presence of
intellect--or evidence of perception--of any sort or kind; no
resemblance--even the feeblest--of anything natural; no invention--even
the most sluggish--of anything agreeable. Had they given us staring
green seas with hatchet edges, such as we see Her Majesty's ships
so-and-so fixed into by the heads or sterns in the first room of the
Royal Academy, the admiration of them would have been comprehensible;
there being a natural predilection in the mind of men for green waves
with curling tops, but not for clay and wool; so that though I can
understand, in some sort, why people admire everything else in old art,
why they admire Salvator's rocks, and Claude's foregrounds, and
Hobbima's trees, and Paul Potter's cattle, and Jan Steen's pans; and
while I can perceive in all these likings a root which seems right and
legitimate, and to be appealed to; yet when I find they can even
_endure_ the _sight_ of a Backhuysen on their room walls (I speak
seriously) it makes me hopeless at once. I may be wrong, or they may be
wrong, but at least I can conceive of no principle or opinion common
between us, which either can address or understand in the other; and yet
I am wrong in this want of conception, for I know that Turner once
liked Vandevelde, and I can trace the evil influence of Vandevelde on
most of his early sea painting, but Turner certainly could not have
liked Vandevelde without _some_ legitimate cause. Another discouraging
point is that I cannot catch a wave, nor Daguerreotype it, and so there
is no coming to pure demonstration; but the forms and hues of water mus