Page:Constable by C. J. Holmes.djvu/52

 The general attitude of these men may be summed up in the verdict of a French critic upon Millais—pour amuser le gentry. In Constable they saw only a painter of pretty rusticity; trim cottages, green fields, brown cows, blue skies, and soft pink clouds. They stippled their work all over, to give it the smoothness which a dunce mistakes for finish. They brightened the colours, so that their stuff might "tell" on a crowded Academy wall. They took care to eliminate everything which might conflict with the air of simpering prosperous respectability, which the patriotic Briton expected from the agricultural classes. Did our yokels always wear such brilliantly white linen, such scarlet caps and coats? Did English milkmaids always brave the elements in the piquant dishabille of convention? Was the sky always a bright chalky blue? Were the clouds always scattered and woolly? Was there always a dot of vermilion somewhere in the foreground, when those innumerable "landscapes with figures" were manufactured by the popular pets of the forties and fifties and sixties and seventies?

That these amiable pot-boiling tradesmen should have appreciated the grand restraint of Titian, the vigour of Rubens, or the intensity of Rembrandt would have been too much to expect, but there is no excuse for their neglect of the noble elements in the genius of their own countryman, Constable. Had they ever looked carefully at nature, and possessed any but the meanest ambitions, they could hardly have failed to sympathize with the sailing clouds of The Cornfield and The Valley Farm, the glistening meadows of The Leaping Horse, the storm and rainbow of the large Salisbury Cathedral, the tremendous desolation of The Old Sarum, or the hush that falls with the twilight of The Cenotaph. For those who are really interested in art there is no gradation in the things that are not art, so that to discuss the descent of certain successful moderns from Creswick or Shayer or Lee or Witherington would be entirely futile.

To such an extent has British landscape been vitiated by this taint of commerce, that it is hard to name more than a few painters and a few pictures which are free from it. Cox and De Wint, in spite of considerable natural gifts, practically succumbed to the necessity of doing small drawings that would sell readily. What Cox might have done under happier circumstances may be guessed from the magnificent drawing at Kensington of a storm sweeping 32