EFFECTS OF FAULTY VISION IN PAINTING. 177 



If you look at a picture which hangs between two windows, you 

 will not be able to see it distinctly, as it will be, so to speak, veiled by 

 a grayish haze. But, if you hold your hands before your eyes so as to 

 shade them from the light of the windows, the veiling mist disappears, 

 and the picture becomes clearly visible. The disturbing light had 

 been diffused by the refracting media of the eye, and had fallen on the 

 same part of the retina on which the picture was formed. If we ex- 

 amine the eye by an illumination resembling that by means of which 

 Prof. Tyndall, in his brilliant experiments, demonstrated to you the 

 imperfect transparency of water, we find that even the clearest and 

 most beautiful eye is not so perfectly transparent as we would sup- 

 pose. The older we get the more the transparency decreases, espe- 

 cially of the lens. But, to produce an effect equal to that visible in 

 Turner's pictures after the year 1831, pathological conditions are re- 

 quired. In the years that followed, as often happens in such cases, a 

 clearly-defined opacity was formed in the slight and diffuse dimness 

 of the crystalline lens. In consequence of this the light was no longer 

 evenly diffused in all directions, but principally dispersed in a vertical 

 direction. At this period the alteration offers, in the case of a painter, 

 the peculiarity that it only affects the appearance of natural objects, 

 where the light is strong enough to produce this disturbing effect, 

 while the light of his painting is too feeble to do so : therefore, the 

 aspect of Nature is altered ; that of his picture correct. Only within 

 the last years of Turner's life, the dimness had increased so much, 

 that it prevented him from seeing even his pictures correctly. This 

 sufficiently accounts for the strange appearance of his last pictures, 

 without its being necessary to take into account the state of his mind. 



It may seem hazardous to designate a period as diseased, the begin- 

 ning of which art-critics and connoisseurs have considered as his 

 climax. I do not think that the two opinions are in decided contra- 

 diction to each other. To be physiologically normal is not at all a 

 fundamental condition in art ; and we cannot deny the legitimacy of 

 the taste which regards that which is entirely sound and healthy as 

 commonplace, trivial, and uninteresting, and which on the contrary is 

 fascinated by that which approaches the border of disease and even, 

 goes beyond it. 



Many of the best musicians, for instance, and some of the greatest 

 admirers of Beethoven, prefer his latest works, and consider them the 

 most interesting, although the influence of his deafness upon them is 

 apparent to others. 



In poetry, we rank some poems among the highest productions of 

 art, in which the imagination of the poet goes far beyond the normal 

 region of the mind : 



" The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, 

 Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven." 



Thus it seems to me perfectly natural that the peculiar poetical 



