-and you will ask me most reasonably--how this
love of nature in modern days can be connected with Christianity, seeing
it is as strong in the infidel Shelley as in the sacred Wordsworth. Yes,
and it is found in far worse men than Shelley. Shelley was an honest
unbeliever, and a man of warm affections; but this new love of nature is
found in the most reckless and unprincipled of the French novelists--in
Eugene Sue, in Dumas, in George Sand--and that intensely. How is this?
Simply because the feeling is reactionary; and, in this phase of it,
common to the diseased mind as well as to the healthy one. A man dying
in the fever of intemperance will cry out for water, and that with a
bitterer thirst than a man whose healthy frame naturally delights in the
mountain spring more than in the wine cup. The water is not dishonored
by that thirst of the diseased, nor is nature dishonored by the love of
the unworthy. That love is, perhaps, the only saving element in their
minds; and it still remains an indisputable truth that the love of
nature is a characteristic of the Christian heart, just as the hunger
for healthy food is characteristic of the healthy frame.

In order to meet this new feeling for nature, there necessarily arose a
new school of landscape painting. That school, like the literature to
which it corresponded, had many weak and vicious elements mixed with its
noble ones; it had its Mrs. Radcliffes and Rousseaus, as well as its
Wordsworths; but, on the whole, the feeling with which Robson drew
mountains, and Prout architecture, with which Fielding draws moors, and
Stanfield sea--is altogether pure, true, and precious, as compared with
that which suggested the landscape of the seventeenth century.

94. Now observe, how simple the whole subject becomes. You have, first,
your great ancient landscape divided into its three periods--Giottesque,
Leonardesque, Titianesque. Then you have a great gap, full of
nonentities and abortions; a gulf of foolishness, into the bottom of
which you may throw Claude and Salvator, neither of them deserving to
give a name to anything. Call it "pastoral" landscape, "guarda e passa,"
and then you have, lastly, the pure, wholesome, simple, modern
landscape. You want a name for that: I will give you one in a moment;
for the whole character and power of that landscape is originally based
on the work of one man.

95. Joseph Mallord William Turner was born in Maiden Lane, London, about
eighty years