TREES IN MODERN PAINTING 249 



landscape painter going about in search of the 

 picturesque, the beautiful or the grand; he 

 realised what he saw around him as merely the 

 momentary condition of things that are con- 

 stantly changing. Ruskin says that he painted 

 rocks and mountains with geological truthful- 

 ness, not because he understood geology, but 

 because he observed and recorded faithfully. 

 But he did more than this, as is shown by the 

 passage just quoted from Ruskin. His render- 

 ing of the mountains and the rocks brings 

 home to us, with startling force, the truth 

 that geology is not the science of past changes 

 only, but of present changes. The forces that 

 have made the world what it now is are still at 

 work, and will continue to work, and will slowly 

 but surely make the world very different from 

 what it is now. The dynamic power of the 

 lightning, the hail, snow and ice, the glacier, 

 the waterfall, the torrent, the sea, in changing 

 the face of the world, is set forth even in 

 Turner's most delicate water-colour drawings. 

 And so it is with his trees. I might have given 

 to them a separate chapter, with some such 

 heading as "The Life-History of Trees, their 

 Joys and their Sorrows ". Nature is not a mere 



