y an unanswerable one.

4. I have limited, you have just heard, landscape painting to the
representation of phenomena relating to human life. You will scarcely
be disposed to admit the propriety of such a limitation; and you will
still less be likely to conceive its necessary strictness and
severity, unless I convince you of it by somewhat detailed examples.

Here are two landscapes by Turner in his greatest time--Vesuvius in
repose, Vesuvius in eruption.

One is a beautiful harmony of cool color; and the other of hot, and
they are both exquisitely designed in ornamental lines. But they are
not painted for those qualities. They are painted because the state of
the scene in one case is full of delight to men; and in the other of
pain and danger. And it is not Turner's object at all to exhibit or
illustrate natural phenomena, however interesting in themselves.

[Illustration: VESUVIUS IN ERUPTION.

From the painting by Turner.]

He does not want to paint blue mist in order to teach you the nature
of evaporation; nor this lava stream, to explain to you the operation
of gravity on ponderous and viscous materials. He paints the blue
mist, because it brings life and joy to men, and the lava stream
because it is death to them.

5. Again here are two sea-pieces by Turner of the same
period--photographs from them at least. One is a calm on the shore at
Scarborough; the other the wreck of an Indiaman.

These also are each painted with exquisitely artistic purpose: the
first in opposition of local black to diffused sunshine; the second in
the decorative grouping of white spots on a dark ground. That
decorative purpose of dappling, or [Greek: poikilia], is as studiously
and deliciously carried out by Turner with the Daedalus side of him, in
the inlaying of these white spots on the Indiaman's deck, as if he
were working a precious toy in ebony and ivory. But Turner did not
paint either of the sea-pieces for the sake of these decorous
arrangements; neither did he paint the Scarborough as a professor of
physical science, to show you the level of low tide on the Yorkshire
coast; nor the Indiaman to show you the force of impact in a liquid
mass of sea-water of given momentum. He painted this to show you the
daily course of quiet human work and happiness, and that, to enable
you to conceive something of uttermost human misery--both ordered by
the power of the great deep.

6. You may easily--you must, perhaps, for a little time