624 APPENDIX

which continued till 1840, and may be broadly considered as the fourth, extremely snuffy and guttery lustre of my life, sixteen to twenty-1835 to 1840-I will here mark only what good was growing through the general ruggedness and temporary blight.

First, I had the sense not to go on making bad drawings in colour, though occasionally by way of indulgence-or for fame in Cornhill¹-doing a vignette in imitation of Turner. And in the pencil work I retreated upon, did honestly try to carry away as much fact as I could, though I saw my way to very little. And here, be it observed in passing, that the method of outline drawing applied to landscape is an entirely modern scientific process, the landscape sketches of all early masters being merely notes of material to be immediately used in the backgrounds of pictures, and therefore merely painter’s shorthand of fragments useful to him, each in his own manner. The idea of a mathematically accurate and attentive summary of the facts of an entire landscape or street view, for the sake of those facts, is essentially modern. Dutch in its origin-in the mere dulness of pleased imitations developed by the Early English water-colour school as preliminary to their attentive work, and explanatory of its rapid and too accidental work-it becomes afterwards a delight in itself, and pleasant insistence on the natures and forms of things, without proceeding to their realization. Turner and Prout perfected the system of it, and throughout their lives made ten outlines to one drawing-nine for their own sake.

There is yet one very important fact to be noted of outline drawing in general, that it entirely refuses emotion. The work must be done with the patience of an accountant, and records only the realities of the scene-not the effects on them. Prout’s towns are all in forenoon sunshine, mine in tranquil shade-Turner’s outlined as it were with camera-lucida. The artist must be happy, at leisure, and resolute-above all, careless of praise. He well knows that no attention will ever be paid by the public to the qualities of an outline.

In my own case, I got much more praise from the general public than I deserved, for my outlines; yet on the whole worked honestly for my own instruction and the record of the scene. Finding, however, my now formed architectural touch incapable of rendering foliage or rocks rightly, I was contented to indicate them by quite wretched conventionalism, the rather that having at present, at all events in idea, to spend most of my time in reading, there was not a moment left to draw mere stones or trees in-if I got my abbey or castle, it was all I hoped.

Nevertheless, the extreme stupidity of the landscape conventionalism into which I fell at this time requires crucial analysis,-which may be reserved to the time of its abandonment, as I have spent enough parenthetic pains on art matters for the present.

In this more or less again prospering and reviving temper, I entered the Yorkshire hill country at Catterick bridge, in 1837, and spent the Sunday and a day or two more at Greta Bridge in a rapture which has been one of the great landmarks and pleasures of memory ever since.²

¹ [Then the place of business of Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co., the publishers of Friendship’s Offering: see above, pp. 90, 91.]

² [See in the text, i. § 244 (p. 218).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]