If it was an oak tree,
the acorns were drawn; if a flint pebble, its veins were drawn; if an
arm of the sea, its fish were drawn; if a group of figures, their
faces and dresses were drawn--to the very last subtlety of expression
and end of thread that could be got into the space, far off or near.
But now our ingenuity is all "concerning smoke." Nothing is truly
drawn but that; all else is vague, slight, imperfect; got with as
little pains as possible. You examine your closest foreground, and
find no leaves; your largest oak, and find no acorns; your human
figure, and find a spot of red paint instead of a face; and in all
this, again and again, the Aristophanic words come true, and the
clouds seem to be "great goddesses to idle men."
The next thing that will strike us, after this love of clouds, is the
love of liberty. Whereas the mediaeval was always shutting himself into
castles, and behind fosses, and drawing brickwork neatly, and beds of
flowers primly, our painters delight in getting to the open fields and
moors; abhor all hedges and moats; never paint anything but free-growing
trees, and rivers gliding "at their own sweet will"; eschew formality
down to the smallest detail; break and displace the brickwork which
the mediaeval would have carefully cemented; leave unpruned the
thickets he would have delicately trimmed; and, carrying the love of
liberty even to license, and the love of wildness even to ruin, take
pleasure at last in every aspect of age and desolation which emancipates
the objects of nature from the government of men;--on the castle wall
displacing its tapestry with ivy, and spreading, through the garden,
the bramble for the rose.
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