284: LANDSCAPE 



men to the emancipation of art in this direction. They 

 frankly ignored the old tradition of historical motives in 

 landscape. The aspects of the earth and sea and sky, the 

 common occupations of mankind upon the fields and in their 

 dwellings, proved for them sufficient sources of inspiration. 

 Dutch painting filled the seventeenth and a portion of the 

 eighteenth century with powerful production, at a time when 

 the resources of Italy were exhausted. It delivered art from 

 the pedantry of humanism, and anticipated the European 

 revolt against classical canons of perfection. Still, the 

 essentially modern enthusiasm for nature, of which I shall 

 shortly have to speak, was not the guiding light of the Dutch 

 painters. Rarely, if ever, do we detect in them a touch of 

 spirituality, a hint of mystery, an imaginative sense of some- 

 thing underlying nature. This must be sought elsewhere. 

 The first day-break of impassioned naturalism meets us in 

 the work of Norfolk drawing-masters, by the side of English 

 streams and lakes, within sight of Snowdon and Helvellyn. 

 The water-colour painters of our school, at the close of the 

 last century, continued landscape on lines suggested by the 

 Dutch. Their choice of subject was, however, more poetic ; 

 their sentiment more delicate ; their will to wait on Nature's 

 moods and to interpret her suggestions more evident. Here 

 we perceive the dawning of that sun which climbed the 

 heavens with Turner. 



All this while, in literature, classical standards of taste 

 continued to prevail. External nature was treated by the 

 poets of Europe throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth 

 centuries with the condescension proper to polite scholars. 

 The religion of that age was formal. Science went slowly 

 forwards, burrowing like a mole beneath the surface of 

 received ideas, and altering the fundamental relations of 

 thought mainly by the demonstration of astronomical laws. 

 A thoroughgoing change was being gradually prepared in 

 our conception of the universal order. Crude guesses, pre- 

 figuring the solid discoveries of geology, the study of primitive 

 society, and the science of comparative biology, jostled with 

 substantial acquisitions of exact knowledge in chemistry and 



