NATURE OF THE PICTURESQUE. 279 tioned may have been made to recall some sound, and the sound may enhance the pleasure of our contemplation of the picture as a whole; but it is the "circumstance," and not the sound, that makes the passage picturesque. The sound is incidental and could be dispensed with without destroying the picturesque effect; but take away what is represented for the eye, and what picture would we have in the sound? No conceivable picture at all. And so we say that the picturesque has reference always directly or indirectly to the eye, and to the eye alone perhaps of all the senses. In a vague and general way it may be said to be that aspect of the beautiful generally which is, or may be, represented with striking and pleasing effect in a picture, or which produces on the mind, through the remembrance of things seen, an effect analogous to that of an object so represented. The latter clause will include style in composition. A picturesque style cannot be represented by anything but itself; but it is picturesque because it is after the manner or in the spirit of a painter, or because it brings before us vividly a picture of the objects or scenes described or spoken of. It is picturesque because of our recollection of objects of sense and our power of recalling them in thought. It has still implicitly a reference or relation to the eye. It conveys the idea of something that might be seen, not heard nor smelled. The picturesque, however, as distinguished from the beautiful, implies also a considerable extent in the field of vision, a certain degree of ruggedness, and usually also of prominence of variety in aspect. A simple flower, an animal, or a house by itself, a rock, or a flash of lightning may be put into a picture; but no such thing by itself, and apart from the surroundings, would be likely to be thought of as picturesque. But let the flower be a water-lily by the margin of a lake in which wild fowl swim, or a boat is moored, and let hills appear in the background, or trees which dapple the lake with their shadow; let the animal be a goat or chamois on the edge of a cliff, beneath which crawls the sea, reflecting the sky and the clouds, or let it be an ass with panniers driven along a dusty road by the side of a mountain stream, or idling by a gipsy's tent from which smoke is curling upwards above an adjacent pine-wood forest; let the house be an ivied castle, with its old hereditary trees and ancient walks across which deer are stalking; let the rock be one on which the broken, jagged trunk of a decaying tree is standing by the side of a river, and near which is an old log cabin in a clearing; and let the lightning be seen against a thunder cloud sweeping along a heaving sea with a ship in distress, and then we begin to come within the limits of the properly picturesque, and we feel the difference between it and the beauty simply of some single object like a stone or a plant. There is still a unity in the scene a unity of visual outline and perspective; but it is a unity which embraces, or which may embrace, a wide range of vision, a well-marked diversity in objects, and which may have many angularities and much that is wild and rough in appearance. In fact, the wildness and roughness, the ruggedness of feature, is usually supposed to be one of the main characteristics, perhaps we might say the main characteristic, of the distinctively picturesque. Old houses, old castles, old trees, prominent headlands, overhanging cliffs and caves, great rocks, and woods, and wild waves, cascades, and streaming hair, and violent gestures, and animals associated NATURE OF THE PICTURESQUE. 281 with mountain fastnesses, and the like, are the things which it embraces; and one of the main problems in connection with it is to account for the fact of an attractiveness and beauty in imperfection and decay. Why should old houses, and old trees, and other such things, be more attractive to the painter and the man of aesthetic taste than those which are new and fresh ? But the consideration of the question may be postponed for a moment till we notify another aspect of the picturesque which is involved in facts already specified. Take the books of picturesque scenery in any country, or visit any picture gallery or exhibition of paintings, or look at the pictures which you may have in the room beside you, or which you may see in the shop windows as you pass along the streets of our towns, and consider what is usually found in the landscape represented-in the scenes which you would naturally call picturesque. Invariably, we may say, sorne sign of animation past or present, some form of life or of motion. There is some old house, or tree, or tumble-down wall; some boat or a bridge; some man, or woman, or child; some beast or bird; some glimpse of water-of lake, or sea, or running stream; and more than likely a combination of such objects-trees, and water, and house, and human being, and beast or bird besides. In a picture which is before me as I write, and which certainly comes within the class we are speaking of, there are all these things, and more too, in beautiful arrangement and perspective; and the longer one looks at the scene the better one likes it. There is the meeting in it of the past and the present and the distant, of the living and the dead, with the boundless beyond of the mountains and sky; and the whole thing is provocative of thought-full of suggestion-and the effect is happy. But remove all trace of human agency and sign of human life, and with these too all animal life, and every sign of water, and you destroy at a stroke the hope of the landscape painter by depriving him of almost everything that would make his pictures effective. And that not merely, as it might be supposed, because you would take away nearly everything that could be painted, but chiefly because you would remove with life and motion the great elements of human interest and passion. Let house or wall remain while you divest them if possible of all relation to human history, and they would be of no more interest to you than a bank of sand. Let animals be painted, but let them be such as you know nothing of in name, or history, or habits, and their effect in a picture would be nil. Let there be water, but throw out all idea of it except such as you might have of a stagnant pool where no life, or even ripple by the wind, has appeared, or fleeting shadow, and you might about as well have a likeness of a sea of mud. Motion, life, animation, and above all human affection and reason in their results, or as embodied in the person, are undoubtedly some of the chief factors in the picturesque; and, without the idea of life in manifestation, of growth and decay with a the emotions and memories and anticipations which they may awaken, it is more than questionable perhaps whether we would have any interest at all in what is now called, and enjoyed as, the picturesque. There is mingling always somehow in our thoughts and perceptions of it our own affections and feelings. We like this or that in a landscape, or picture, or description, hot only because of what it is immediately to the eye, but also because it is suggestive of some experience or interest of EXPLANATION OF BEAUTY IN DECAY. 283 our own which is conceived at the same time as common to humanity. And hence the effectiveness of ruin and decay in landscape and painting. They intensify our feeling of existence and the mystery of being by dreams of life gone by in contrast and comparison with the possibilities of the present. They present us in imagination with an accumulation of experiences and possibilities of action-with the idea of animation manifoldly multiplied. They give scope for the imagination: they give rise to reverie. Their beauty is largely in their suggestiveness: not only in what they present to the eye, but in what they yield to the mind in imaginative and kindly sympathetic moods when we feel the pulsing as it were of another heart than ours and our emotions mingling with the spirit of the universe. Their power over us is proof that our souls are not dead, but have divine capabilities still of sympathy and adoration, and that the universe is not all material, but a thing to us of thought and affection or the embodiment of the highest good. We are evidently thus passing from things to thoughts, from qualities of matter to the beauties of the spirit; and we are beginning to perceive even more than ever how closely they are related, and how impossible it is in aesthetics as in science to make any hard separation between the material and the mental. And when we pass in advance from the picturesque to the grand and the sublime, we enter more deeply still into the region of symbol and expression, into the realm of the spiritual in which we are haunted for ever by the eternal mind. Mountains, and sky, and sea, and space, and time by their very vastness and by way of seeming contradiction bring to our lips the question, is there |