248 TREES IN NATURE, MYTH & ART 



from above, and forces it for twenty years to 

 grow with weight of a couple of tons leaning 

 on its side. Hence, especially at edges of 

 loose cliffs, about waterfalls, or at glacier banks 

 and in other places liable to disturbance, the 

 pine may be seen distorted and oblique, and in 

 Turner's ' Source of the Arveron ' he has, with 

 his usual unerring perception of the main point 

 in any matter, fastened on this means of relat- 

 ing the glacier's history. The glacier cannot 

 explain its own motion ; and ordinary observers 

 saw in it only its rigidity ; but Turner saw that 

 the wonderful thing was its non-rigidity. Other 

 ice is fixed, only this ice stirs. All the banks 

 are staggering beneath its waves, crumbling 

 and withered as by the blast of a perpetual 

 storm. He made the rocks of his foreground 

 loose — rolling and tottering down together; 

 the pines smitten aside by them, their tops 

 dead, bared by the ice-wind." 



Turner's art was intensely dramatic. Those 

 who have not studied his work from such a 

 point of view would be surprised to find how 

 much there is in it of the drama of human life, 

 both collective and individual. And so it was 

 with regard to nature. He was not a mere 



