h. And yet he came back to it for a home, not
ill-content.

After another visit to Chamouni, he crossed France to Paris, where
something awaited him that upset all his plans, and turned his energies
into an unexpected channel.

CHAPTER II

CHRISTIAN ART (1845-1847)

At Paris, on the way heme in 1844, he had spent some days in studying
Titian and Bellini and Perugino. They were not new to him; but now that
he was an art-critic, it behoved him to improve his acquaintance with
the old masters. "To admire the works of Pietro Perugino" was one thing;
but to understand them was another, a thing which was hardly attempted
by "the Landscape Artists of England" to whom the author of "Modern
Painters" had so far dedicated his services. He had been extolling
modernism, and depreciating "the Ancients" because they could not draw
rocks and clouds and trees; and he was fresh from his scientific
sketching in the happy hunting-ground of the modern world. A few days in
the Louvre made him the devotee of ancient art, and taught him to lay
aside his geology for history.

In one way the development was easy. The patient attempt to copy
mountain-form had made him sensitive to harmony of line; and in the
great composers of Florence and Venice he found a quality of abstract
design which tallied with his experience of what was beautiful in
Nature. Aiguilles and glaciers, drawn as he drew them, and the
figure-subjects of severe Italian draughtsmen, are beautiful by the same
laws of composition, however different the associations they suggest.

But _he_ had been learning these laws of beauty from Turner and from the
Alps; how did the ancients come by them? This could be found only in a
thorough study of their lives and times, to begin with, to which he
devoted his winter, with Rio and Lord Lindsay and Mrs. Jameson for his
authorities. He found that his foes, Caspar Poussin and Canaletto, and
the Dutch landscapists, were not the real old masters; that there had
been a great age of art before the era of Vandyck and Rubens--even before
Michelangelo and Raphael; and that, towards setting up as a critic of
the present, he must understand the past out of which it had grown. So
he determined to go to Florence and Venice, and to study the religious
painters at first hand.

Mountain-study and Turner were not to be dropped. For example, to
explain the obvious and notorious licences which Turner took with
topography, it was necessary to se