APPENDIX 627

so to Tours, where, finding another bad cathedral, I was glad to give up architecture and turn the horses’ heads to the mountains.

In a couple of days-one given to see the tapestry work at Aubusson-we saw the blue waves of Auvergne rolling along the southern sky. A little white stone, dull white enough, and of an extremely uncrystalline, indefinable, metamorphic sort, much like my own mind at this time, is still kept in my cabinet at Brantwood, in memory of a happy Sunday afternoon at Pont Gibaud.

The drive thence by Le Puy to Clermont showed me-what I knew at the time would be all I should ever care to see, of volcanic mountain and country, in which the so-called rocks are not really rocks, but cinders. The unnatural architecture of the basalt interested me only at Le Puy, where it is less formally columnar. I have only confirmed by afterthought, and experience, the conviction expressed in Modern Painters¹ of the harm done to landscape painters by studying the rugged disorders, or graceless order, of volcanic rock.

Thence, the journey by Valence to Avignon was all made gloomy ...

[The MS. here continues as in the text, ii. § 22 (p. 263).]

1842

[Although it relates to the tour of 1842, this passage in the MS. follows i. § 194 of the text (p. 167).]

It had been planned that we should spend a month in Chamouni; which being duly given, we went up to Berne and home by Carlsruhe, Mayence, Cologne, and St. Quentin. At the last two towns I made the two last drawings ever executed in my “first manner.”² One careful outline of Mont Blanc with the village of the Prieuré,³ a few studies of towers at Mayence, a bit of the Hotel de Ville at Louvain and the lighthouse of Calais,⁴ were all that I brought home that year, with one sheet of studies of figures.

The two outlines of St. Quentin and Cologne were made for the sake of knowing the places only-the sheet of figures was an experiment on the time necessary to draw them rightly. I thought and looked, much more than I drew; and was surprised to find at Louvain and Antwerp that my taste in architecture was also changing, and that their Flemish buildings were by no means so good as I had supposed.

I made careful notes on Vandyck and Rubens in the principal galleries, and came home humiliated indeed about my former work-but in a state of extreme pride and enthusiasm, at having found out so much that was assuredly now right, for myself;-and of corresponding contempt for the various masters of whom none had set me in the right way.

¹ [See, for instance, Vol. III. pp. 426, 473; and Vol. VII. p. 307.]

² [See above, p. 316.]

³ [Perhaps the frontispiece to Vol. II.]

⁴ [Plate XII. in Vol. XIV. (p. 408).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]