Page:Constable by C. J. Holmes.djvu/45

 unfortunate. He was at least spared the pain of seeing his work steadily deteriorate with advancing years. No deduction can be made from the sum-total of his achievement by balancing any feeble productions of old age against the excellence of maturity, as foolish people are apt to do in the case of men like Titian or Turner, who outlived the culmination of their genius. There is evidence, too, that Constable was not likely to have attained to greater perfection; indeed, in some respects, his work might have become in time less evenly excellent.

Some of the pictures exhibited after 1825, the Gillingham Mill, for instance, have the solidity and soundness of his full maturity, but in such cases it will be found that the pictures had been in hand for some time, and the date of exhibition represents only the date at which the finishing touches were added. The evidence of Constable's later sketches is more decisive. The studies made after the painter's fiftieth year are loose hasty memoranda, done anyhow. A few, it is true, are finished carefully, but they are the exceptions. As a rule, the passion for brightness, movement, and glitter becomes increasingly predominant, to the exclusion of graver artistic qualities, till at times the result is strikingly modern. The Kensington study of a tree stem surrounded by blazing sunlight has already been mentioned as an anticipation of Manet. In certain other sketches Constable went still further, and by a loose tremulous handling caught the effect of atmospheric vibration, which was rediscovered many years later by Monet and Pissarro. The logical result of such experiments is scientific imitation rather than Art, and, though a longer life might have enabled Constable to become even more modern than he is, it is doubtful whether he would have added to his fame as an artist.

The actual scope of his achievement is already wide enough. In early life his aim had been to find out how far the cool fresh colours of the skies and streams and fields and trees of his beloved Suffolk could be suggested within the then accepted limits of oil-painting. In middle age this aim was complicated by the desire of rendering effects of wind and storm, so that his work became the channel of deeper and stronger emotions than those aroused by rusticity in its everyday aspect. Doubtless the discouraging circumstances in which he developed had something to do with this preference for the more threatening and gloomy attitudes of 25