The natural in visible objects is whatever is ordinarily presented to the senses: the picturesque1 is that which stands out and catches the attention by some striking peculiarity3: the ideal is that which answers to the preconceived imagination and appetite in the mind for love and beauty. The picturesque depends chiefly on the principle of discrimination or contrast; the ideal on harmony and continuity of effect: the one surprises, the other satisfies the mind; the one starts off from a given point, the other reposes5 on itself; the one is determined6 by an excess of form, the other by a concentration of feeling.
The picturesque may be considered as something like an excrescence on the face of nature. It runs imperceptibly into the fantastical and grotesque7. Fairies and satyrs are picturesque; but they are scarcely ideal. They are an extreme and unique conception of a certain thing, but not of what the mind delights in or broods fondly over. The image created by the artist’s hand is not moulded and fashioned by the love of good and yearning8 after grace and beauty, but rather the contrary: that is they are ideal deformity, not ideal beauty. Rubens was perhaps the most picturesque of painters; but he was almost the least ideal. So Rembrandt was (out of sight) the most picturesque of colourists; as Correggio was the most ideal. In other words, his composition of light and shade is more a whole, more in unison9, more blended into the same harmonious10 feeling than Rembrandt’s, who staggers by contrast, but does not soothe11 by gradation. Correggio’s forms, indeed, had a picturesque air; for they often incline (even when most beautiful) to the quaintness12 of caricature. Vandyke, I think, was at once the least picturesque and least ideal of all the great painters. He was purely13 natural, and neither selected from outward forms nor added anything from his own mind. He owes everything to perfect truth, clearness, and transparency; and though his productions certainly arrest the eye, and strike in a room full of pictures, it is from the contrast they present to other pictures, and from being stripped quite naked of all artificial advantages. They strike almost as a piece of white paper would, hung up in the same situation — I began with saying that whatever stands out from a given line, and as it were projects upon the eye, is picturesque; and this holds true (comparatively) in form and colour. A rough terrier dog, with the hair bristled14 and matted together, is picturesque. As we say, there is a decided15 character in it, a marked determination to an extreme point. A shock-dog is odd and disagreeable, but there is nothing picturesque in its appearance; it is a mere16 mass of flimsy confusion. A goat with projecting horns and pendent beard is a picturesque animal; a sheep is not. A horse is only picturesque from opposition17 of colour; as in Mr. Northcote’s study of Gadshill, where the white horse’s head coming against the dark, scowling18 face of the man makes as fine a contrast as can be imagined. An old stump19 of a tree with rugged20 bark, and one or two straggling branches, a little stunted21 hedge-row line, marking the boundary of the horizon, a stubble-field, a winding22 path, a rock seen against the sky, are picturesque, because they have all of them prominence23 and a distinctive24 character of their own. They are not objects (to borrow Shakespear’s phrase) ‘of no mark or likelihood.’ A country may be beautiful, romantic, or sublime25, without being picturesque. The Lakes in the North of England are not picturesque, though certainly the most interesting sight in this country. To be a subject for painting, a prospect26 must present sharp, striking points of view or singular forms, or one object must relieve and set off another. There must be distinct stages and salient points for the eye to rest upon or start from in its progress over the expanse before it. The distance of a landscape will oftentimes look flat or heavy, that the trunk of a tree or a ruin in the foreground would immediately throw into perspective and turn to air. Rembrandt’s landscapes are the least picturesque in the world, except from the straight lines and sharp angles, the deep incision28 and dragging of his pencil, like a harrow over the ground, and the broad contrast of earth and sky. Earth, in his copies, is rough and hairy; and Pan has struck his hoof29 against it! — A camel is a picturesque ornament30 in a landscape or history-piece. This is not merely from its romantic and oriental character; for an elephant has not the same effect, and if introduced as a necessary appendage31, is also an unwieldy incumbrance. A negro’s head in a group is picturesque from contrast; so are the spots on a panther’s hide. This was the principle that Paul Veronese went upon, who said the rule for composition was black upon white, and while upon black. He was a pretty good judge. His celebrated32 picture of the Marriage of Cana is in all likelihood the completest piece of workmanship extant in the art. When I saw it, it nearly covered one side of a large room in the Louvre (being itself forty feet by twenty)— and it seemed as if that side of the apartment was thrown open, and you looked out at the open sky, at buildings, marble pillars, galleries with people in them, emperors, female slaves, Turks, negroes, musicians, all the famous painters of the time, the tables loaded with viands33, goblets34, and dogs under them — a sparkling, overwhelming confusion, a bright, unexpected reality — the only fault you could find was that no miracle was going on in the faces of the spectators: the only miracle there was the picture itself! A French gentleman, who showed me this ‘triumph of painting’ (as it has been called), perceiving I was struck with it, observed, ‘My wife admires it exceedingly for the facility of the execution.’ I took this proof of sympathy for a compliment. It is said that when Humboldt, the celebrated traveller and naturalist35, was introduced to Buonaparte, the Emperor addressed him in these words —‘Vous aimez la botanique, Monsieur’; and on the other’s replying in the affirmative, added, ‘Et ma femme aussi!’ This has been found fault with as a piece of brutality36 and insolence37 in the great man by bigoted38 critics, who do not know what a thing it is to get a Frenchwoman to agree with them in any point. For my part, I took the observation as it was meant, and it did not put me out of conceit39 with myself or the picture that Madame M—— liked it as well as Monsieur l’Anglois. Certainly, there could be no harm in that. By the side of it happened to be hung two allegorical pictures of Rubens (and in such matters he too was ‘no baby’91)— I don’t remember what the figures were, but the texture40 seemed of wool or cotton. The texture of the Paul Veronese was not wool or cotton, but stuff, jewels, flesh, marble, air, whatever composed the essence of the varied41 subjects, in endless relief and truth of handling. If the Fleming had seen his two allegories hanging where they did, he would, without a question, have wished them far enough.
I imagine that Rubens’s landscapes are picturesque: Claude’s are ideal. Rubens is always in extremes; Claude in the middle. Rubens carries some one peculiar2 quality or feature of nature to the utmost verge42 of probability: Claude balances and harmonises different forms and masses with laboured delicacy43, so that nothing falls short, no one thing overpowers another. Rainbows, showers, partial gleams of sunshine, moonlight, are the means with which Rubens produces his most gorgeous and enchanting44 effects: there are neither rainbows, nor showers, nor sudden bursts of sunshine, nor glittering moonbeams in Claude. He is all softness and proportion: the other is all spirit and brilliant excess. The two sides (for example) of one of Claude’s landscapes balance one another, as in a scale of beauty: in Rubens the several objects are grouped and thrown together with capricious wantonness. Claude has more repose4: Rubens more gaiety and extravagance. And here it might be asked, Is a rainbow a picturesque or an ideal object? It seems to me to be both. It is an accident in nature; but it is an inmate45 of the fancy. It startles and surprises the sense, but it soothes46 and tranquillises the spirit. It makes the eye glisten47 to behold48 it, but the mind turns to it long after it has faded from its place in the sky. It has both properties, then, of giving an extraordinary impulse to the mind by the singularity of its appearance, and of riveting49 the imagination by its intense beauty. I may just notice here in passing, that I think the effect of moonlight is treated in an ideal manner in the well-known line in Shakespear —
See how the moonlight sleeps upon yon bank.
The image is heightened by the exquisiteness50 of the expression beyond its natural beauty, and it seems as if there could be no end to the delight taken in it. — A number of sheep coming to a pool of water to drink, with shady trees in the background, the rest of the flock following them, and the shepherd and his dog left carelessly behind, is surely the ideal in landscape-composition, if the ideal has its source in the interest excited by a subject, in its power of drawing the affections after it linked in a golden chain, and in the desire of the mind to dwell on it for ever. The ideal, in a word, is the height of the pleasing, that which satisfies and accords with the inmost longing51 of the soul: the picturesque is merely a sharper and bolder impression of reality. A morning mist drawing a slender veil over all objects is at once picturesque and ideal; for it in the first place excites immediate27 surprise and admiration52, and in the next a wish for it to continue, and a fear lest it should be too soon dissipated. Is the Cupid riding on a lion in the ceiling at Whitehall, and urging him with a spear over a precipice53, with only clouds and sky beyond, most picturesque or ideal? It has every effect of startling contrast and situation, and yet inspires breathless expectation and wonder for the event. Rembrandt’s Jacob’s Dream, again, is both fearful to the eye, but realising that loftiest vision of the soul. Take two faces in Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, the Judas and the St John: the one is all strength, repulsive54 character; the other is all divine grace and mild sensibility. The individual, the characteristic in painting, is that which is in a marked manner — the ideal is that which we wish anything to be, and to contemplate55 without measure and without end. The first is truth, the last is good. The one appeals to the sense and understanding, the other to the will and the affections. The truly beautiful and grand attracts the mind to it by instinctive56 harmony, is absorbed in it, and nothing can ever part them afterwards. Look at a Madonna of Raphael’s: what gives the ideal character to the expression — the insatiable purpose of the soul, or its measureless content in the object of its contemplation? A portrait of Vandyke’s is mere indifference57 and still-life in the comparison: it has not in it the principle of growing and still unsatisfied desire. In the ideal there is no fixed58 stint59 or limit but the limit of possibility: it is the infinite with respect to human capacities and wishes. Love is for this reason an ideal passion. We give to it our all of hope, of fear, of present enjoyment60, and stake our last chance of happiness wilfully61 and desperately62 upon it. A good authority puts into the mouth of one of his heroines —
My bounty63 is as boundless64 as the sea,
My love as deep!
How many fair catechumens will there be found in all ages to repeat as much after Shakespear’s Juliet!
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picturesque
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| adj.美丽如画的，（语言）生动的，绘声绘色的 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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peculiarity
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| n.独特性，特色；特殊的东西；怪癖 | |
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repose
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| v.(使)休息；n.安息 | |
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reposes
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| v.将（手臂等）靠在某人（某物）上( repose的第三人称单数 ) | |
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determined
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| adj.坚定的；有决心的 | |
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grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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yearning
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| a.渴望的；向往的；怀念的 | |
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unison
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| n.步调一致，行动一致 | |
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harmonious
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| adj.和睦的，调和的，和谐的，协调的 | |
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soothe
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| v.安慰；使平静；使减轻；缓和；奉承 | |
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quaintness
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| n.离奇有趣，古怪的事物 | |
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purely
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| adv.纯粹地，完全地 | |
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bristled
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| adj. 直立的，多刺毛的 动词bristle的过去式和过去分词 | |
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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scowling
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| 怒视，生气地皱眉( scowl的现在分词 ) | |
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stump
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| n.残株，烟蒂，讲演台；v.砍断，蹒跚而走 | |
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rugged
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| adj.高低不平的，粗糙的，粗壮的，强健的 | |
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stunted
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| adj.矮小的；发育迟缓的 | |
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winding
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| n.绕，缠，绕组，线圈 | |
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prominence
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| n.突出；显著；杰出；重要 | |
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distinctive
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| adj.特别的，有特色的，与众不同的 | |
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sublime
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| adj.崇高的，伟大的；极度的，不顾后果的 | |
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prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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incision
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| n．切口，切开 | |
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hoof
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| n.(马，牛等的)蹄 | |
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ornament
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| v.装饰，美化；n.装饰，装饰物 | |
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appendage
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| n.附加物 | |
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celebrated
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| adj.有名的，声誉卓著的 | |
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viands
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| n.食品，食物 | |
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goblets
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| n.高脚酒杯( goblet的名词复数 ) | |
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naturalist
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| n.博物学家(尤指直接观察动植物者) | |
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brutality
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| n.野蛮的行为，残忍，野蛮 | |
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insolence
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| n.傲慢；无礼；厚颜；傲慢的态度 | |
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bigoted
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| adj.固执己见的，心胸狭窄的 | |
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conceit
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| n.自负，自高自大 | |
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texture
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| n.(织物)质地；(材料)构造；结构；肌理 | |
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varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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verge
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| n.边，边缘；v.接近，濒临 | |
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delicacy
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| n.精致，细微，微妙，精良；美味，佳肴 | |
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enchanting
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| a.讨人喜欢的 | |
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inmate
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| n.被收容者；(房屋等的)居住人；住院人 | |
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soothes
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| v.安慰( soothe的第三人称单数 )；抚慰；使舒服；减轻痛苦 | |
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glisten
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| vi.（光洁或湿润表面等）闪闪发光，闪闪发亮 | |
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behold
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| v.看，注视，看到 | |
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riveting
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| adj.动听的，令人着迷的，完全吸引某人注意力的；n.铆接（法） | |
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exquisiteness
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longing
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| n.（for）渴望 | |
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admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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precipice
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| n.悬崖，危急的处境 | |
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repulsive
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| adj.排斥的，使人反感的 | |
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contemplate
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| vt.盘算，计议；周密考虑；注视，凝视 | |
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instinctive
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| adj.(出于)本能的；直觉的；(出于)天性的 | |
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indifference
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| n.不感兴趣，不关心，冷淡，不在乎 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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stint
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| v.节省，限制，停止；n.舍不得化，节约，限制；连续不断的一段时间从事某件事 | |
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enjoyment
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| n.乐趣；享有；享用 | |
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wilfully
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| adv.任性固执地；蓄意地 | |
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desperately
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| adv.极度渴望地，绝望地，孤注一掷地 | |
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bounty
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| n.慷慨的赠予物，奖金；慷慨，大方；施与 | |
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boundless
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| adj.无限的；无边无际的；巨大的 | |
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