other works of Turner, in which he will always find the associative imagination developed in the most profuse and marvellous modes; especially in the drawing of foliage and skies, in both of which the presence or absence of the associative power may best be tested in all artists. I have, however, confined my present illustrations chiefly to foliage, because other operations of the imagination, besides the associative, interfere extensively in the treatment of sky.

There remains but one question to be determined relating to this faculty; what operation, namely, supposing it possessed in high degree, it has or ought to have in the artist's treatment of natural scenery?

§ 21. The due function of associative imagination with respect to nature.

I have just said that nature is always imaginative,* but it does not follow that her imagination is always of high subject, or that the imagination of all the parts is of a like and sympathetic kind; the boughs of every bramble bush are imaginatively arranged, so are those of every oak and cedar; but it does not follow that there is imaginative sympathy between bramble and cedar. There are few natural scenes whose harmonies are not conceivably improvable either by banishment of some discordant point, or by addition of some sympathetic one; it constantly happens that there is a profuseness too great to be comprehended, or an inequality in the pitch, meaning, and intensity of different parts. The imagination will banish all that is extraneous; it will seize out of the many threads of different feeling which nature has suffered to become entangled, one only; and where that seems thin and likely to break, it will spin it stouter, and in doing this, it never knots, but weaves in the new thread; so that all its work looks as pure and true as nature itself, and cannot be guessed from it but by its exceeding simplicity, (known from it, it cannot be); so that herein we

* What I meant by this twice repeated bit of nonsense, was a fact of some interest, had it been better explained, namely, that almost any honest study of natural grouping will look intellectually, if not always agreeably, composed,1 provided it be honest throughout. [1883.]

1 [See Vol. III. p. xxi.]

find another test of the imaginative work, that it looks always as if it had been gathered straight from nature, whereas the unimaginative shows its joints and knots, and is visibly composition.

work is its

And here, then, we arrive at an important conclusion (though one somewhat contrary to the positions § 22. The sign commonly held on the subject), namely, that if of imaginative anything looks unnatural, there can be no imagina- appearance of tion in it (at least not associative). We frequently absolute truth. hear works that have no truth in them justified or elevated on the score of being imaginative. Let it be understood once for all, that imagination never deigns to touch anything but truth; and though it does not follow that where there is the appearance of truth, there has been imaginative operation, of this we may be assured, that where there is appearance of falsehood, the imagination has had no hand.*

For instance, the landscape above mentioned of Titian's St. Jerome' may, for aught I know, be a pure transcript of a rocky slope covered with chestnuts among his native mountains. It has all the look of a sketch from nature; if it be not, the imagination developed in it is of the highest order; if it be, the imagination has only acted in the suggestion of the dark sky, of the shape of the flakes of solemn cloud, and of the gleam of russet light along the distant ground. †

* Compare Chap. III. § 30.**

** Untrue again, in the sweeping negation: right only in the general connection of wisely inventive with closely observant faculty. [1883.]

It is said at Venice that Titian took the trees of the S. Pietro Martire out of his garden opposite Murano.2 I think this unlikely; there is something about the lower trunks that has a taint of composition: the thought of the whole, however, is thoroughly fine. The backgrounds of the frescoes at Padua are also very characteristic, and the well-known woodcut of St. Francis receiving the stigmata3 one of the mightiest of existing landscape thoughts; and yet it is pure portraiture of pine and Spanish chestnut.

Again, it is impossible to tell whether the two nearest trunks of the Asacus and Hesperie of the Liber Studiorum,1 especially the large one on the right with the ivy, have been invented, or taken straight from nature; they have all the look of accurate portraiture. I can hardly imagine anything so perfect to have been obtained except from the real thing; but we know that the imagination must have begun to operate somewhere, we cannot tell where, since the multitudinous harmonies of the rest of the picture could hardly in any real scene have continued so inviolately sweet.

The final tests, therefore, of the work of associative imagination are, its intense simplicity, its perfect harmony, and its absolute truth. It may be a harmony, majestic or humble, abrupt or prolonged, but it is always a governed and perfect whole; evidencing in all its relations the weight, prevalence, and universal dominion of an awful inexplicable Power; a chastising, animating, and disposing Mind.

2

1 [Engraved and further described in Lectures on Landscape, § 93; and see preceding volume, pp. 240, 586, and Modern Painters, vol. v. pt. ix. ch. xi. § 29.]

[The MS. reading of this last sentence may be given as an instance of Ruskin's careful revision, which was also in most cases compression: "It may be a harmony of majesty or of humility, of sorrow or of cheerfulness, but it is always a governed and perfect whole; and in its government, whether it be a work of art, or a scene of nature, there is felt the weight, prevalence, and universal dominion of an awful and inexplicable Power; a chastising, animating, and all-absorbing mind."]