Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/187

Rh If you look at a picture which hangs between two windows, you will not be able to see it distinctly, as it will be, so to speak, veiled by a grayish haze. But, if you hold your hands before your eyes so as to shade them from the light of the windows, the veiling mist disappears, and the picture becomes clearly visible. The disturbing light had been diffused by the refracting media of the eye, and had fallen on the same part of the retina on which the picture was formed. If we examine the eye by an illumination resembling that by means of which Prof. Tyndall, in his brilliant experiments, demonstrated to you the imperfect transparency of water, we find that even the clearest and most beautiful eye is not so perfectly transparent as we would suppose. The older we get the more the transparency decreases, especially of the lens. But, to produce an effect equal to that visible in Turner's pictures after the year 1831, pathological conditions are required. In the years that followed, as often happens in such cases, a clearly-defined opacity was formed in the slight and diffuse dimness of the crystalline lens. In consequence of this the light was no longer evenly diffused in all directions, but principally dispersed in a vertical direction. At this period the alteration offers, in the case of a painter, the peculiarity that it only affects the appearance of natural objects, where the light is strong enough to produce this disturbing effect, while the light of his painting is too feeble to do so: therefore, the aspect of Nature is altered; that of his picture correct. Only within the last years of Turner's life, the dimness had increased so much, that it prevented him from seeing even his pictures correctly. This sufficiently accounts for the strange appearance of his last pictures, without its being necessary to take into account the state of his mind.

It may seem hazardous to designate a period as diseased, the beginning of which art-critics and connoisseurs have considered as his climax. I do not think that the two opinions are in decided contradiction to each other. To be physiologically normal is not at all a fundamental condition in art; and we cannot deny the legitimacy of the taste which regards that which is entirely sound and healthy as commonplace, trivial, and uninteresting, and which on the contrary is fascinated by that which approaches the border of disease and even, goes beyond it.

Many of the best musicians, for instance, and some of the greatest admirers of Beethoven, prefer his latest works, and consider them the most interesting, although the influence of his deafness upon them is apparent to others.

In poetry, we rank some poems among the highest productions of art, in which the imagination of the poet goes far beyond the normal region of the mind:

Thus it seems to me perfectly natural that the peculiar poetical