ed
sincerely to see the magnificence of Turner, and to loathe the
artificiality of Claude Lorraine. But when he arrived at his more
independent attitude, he found that there was much to admire in Claude;
that exquisite golden atmosphere, suffusing a whole picture with an
evening glow, enriching the lavish foreground, and touching into
romantic beauty headland after headland, that ran out, covered with
delicate woodland, into the tranquil lake; those ruinous temples with a
quiet flight of birds about them; the mysterious figures of men
emerging from the woods on the edges of the water, bent serenely on
some simple business, had the magical charm; and then those faint
mountains closing the horizon, all rounded with the golden haze of
evening, seemed to hold, in their faintly indicated heights and folds,
a delicate peace, a calm repose, as though glad just to be, just to
wait in that reposeful hour for the quiet blessing of waning light, the
sober content so richly shed abroad. It was not criticism, Hugh
thought, to say that it was all impossibly combined, falsely conceived.
It was not, perhaps, a transcript of any one place or one hour; but it
had an inner truth for all that; it had the spirit of evening with its
pleasant weariness, its gentle recollection, its waiting for repose; or
it had again the freshness of the morning, the vital hope that makes it
delightful to rise, to cast off sleep, to go abroad, making light of
the toil and heat that the day is to bring.

And then, in studying Turner, he learnt to see that, lying intermingled
with all the power and nobility of much of his work, there was a
displeasing extravagance, a violence, a faultiness of detail, an
exaggeration that often ruined his pictures. Neither he nor Claude
were true to life; but there was an insolence sometimes about Turner's
variation from fact, which made him shudder. How he seemed sometimes,
in his pictures of places familiar to Hugh--such, for instance, as the
drawing of Malham Cove--to miss, by his heady violence, all the real,
the essential charm of the place. Nature was not what Turner depicted
it; and he did not even develop and heighten its beauty, but
substituted for the real charm an almost grotesque personal mannerism.
Turner's idea of nature seemed to Hugh often purely theatrical and
melodramatic, wanting in restraint, in repose. The appeal of Turner
seemed to him to be constantly an appeal to childish and unperceptive
minds, th