Our chief ideas about
the wood are connected with poaching. We have no belief that the
clouds contain more than so many inches of rain or hail, and from our
ponds and ditches expect nothing more divine than ducks and
watercresses.
Finally: connected with this profanity of temper is a strong tendency
to deny the sacred element of colour, and make our boast in blackness.
For though occasionally glaring or violent, modern colour is on the
whole eminently sombre, tending continually to grey or brown, and by
many of our best painters consistently falsified, with a confessed
pride in what they call chaste or subdued tints; so that, whereas a
mediaeval paints his sky bright blue and his foreground bright green,
gilds the towers of his castles, and clothes his figures with purple
and white, we paint our sky grey, our foreground black, and our
foliage brown, and think that enough is sacrificed to the sun in
admitting the dangerous brightness of a scarlet cloak or a blue
jacket.
These, I believe, are the principal points which would strike us
instantly, if we were to be brought suddenly into an exhibition of
modern landscapes out of a room filled with mediaeval work. It is
evident that there are both evil and good in this change; but how much
evil, or how much good, we can only estimate by considering, as in the
former divisions of our inquiry, what are the real roots of the habits
of mind which have caused them.
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