THE SYLVAN YEAR.*
WHEN Mr Hamerton has a pen in his hand, which is more often than not, he is sure to write well, and what he writes about Art• is generally plain and sensible ; and so out of a year's memoranda in the woods, a store of reading in the poets, and some knowledge of natural history, he here fills 240 pages of moderate size with pleasant and not unprofitable talk. Yet the Sylvan Year is rather a disappointing kind of book, less perhaps in respect of promise unfulfilled, than in the impression it leaves that it might have been something better. It is scarcely complete enough to- be valuable for reference, and scarcely suggestive enough to lead to further study, and it is not very easy to define the class of readers to whom it is chiefly addressed. The author's view of the forest is, as he tells us, that of an artist, and not a man of science ; and conceiving that an element of human interest is essential ta an artistic interest in nature, he introduces one or two fictitious personages "to give more unity" to his pages. He has done this, he says, "after some hesitation," and judging by the result, we fear that his final decision has not been the best. For the slender thread of narrative in the first few chapters hangs quite free from. the real subject of the book, which is strung with sufficient strength upon the natural course of the months and seasons ; and the effect thus produced is the very opposite of unity. We are called upon to picture to ourselves a French pro- priltaire in a Burgundy forest, seeking, after bereavements of the war, to acquire fresh spirits by converse with external nature, and vainly hoping, during a year's retirement, both to awaken in, his son a taste for art, and to induce him to pursue the boars and the classics with equal ardour. As if by way of prologue to some little sylvan drama, we have in an early chapter a graphic account of these two being benighted in the woods, and we are introduced to a wondrous poacher, to become in the sequel the father's game- keeper and the son's companion in sport. After being thus made acquainted, as it seems, with the dramatis persona, it is a little. disappointing to us to find that it is allpersona and no drama, that there are to be no more adventures to excite, no plot is to be un- ravelled, no character to be further developed. In the very next chapter the author begins, not, indeed, to worry dry leaves, but to expatiate on their beauty, the budding of the oak and the horn- beam, and the characteristic colours of a wintry landscape, and from thenceforth, although the whole discourse is placed in the mouth of M. Raoul Dubois, there is scarcely any further attempt at personal disguise. No one acquainted with modern English art-literature will need to be told, for "more better assurance,' that he, Dubois, is not Dubois, but P. G. Hamerton, editor of the Portfolio. Indeed, it is probable that the desultory nature of the book is chiefly due to the fact that it came out piece-meal in the excellent art-magazine last mentioned. We bethink ourselves, -too, of a confession prefixed to the same author's Thoughts About Art, that in his first book, the Camp in the Highlands, its narrative of tent-life was but a bait held out to induce the reading of these same Thoughts, when they appeared in the form of an appendix thereto. Such is, seemingly, the relation borne by Dubois et Ella and Weasel, the keeper, to the substance of the Sylvan Year.
The body of the book is chiefly made up of notes on the aspect of the woods at different seasons of, the year, the trees which are in leaf, and the varieties of green and brown and red that their leaves present, the plants which make most show in the foreground,. and the flowers which by their number give a general tint to the landscape. But the author makes no attempt to furnish a sys- tematic calendar of vegetation, nor, on the other hand, does he confine himself to mere description of the external aspect of nature. Where occasion offers, he branches off into mattera literary, artistic, or didactic, watching with Chaucer the opening of the " daisie," sentimentalising with Wordsworth over the lesser celandine, or moralising on his own account on the nest-building of birds and other rural pursuits.
We have said that Mr. Hamerton professes to regard the forest with the eye of an artist rather than a scientific botanist. But "there are artises and artises," as the coachman said in The Neweomes, and our author's use of the word seems to embrace at least two classes of observers. Sometimes he speaks as the practical landscape painter who desires to record the features of nature, but more often as the lover of all that is beautiful, whether paintable or not. A flowering plant is therefore dealt with not • The Sylvan Year: Leaves from The Note-beak of Raoul Dubois. By Philip Gilbert Eamerton, with Twenty Etchings by the Author and other Artiste. London : Seeley, Jackson, and Halliday. 1876.
only as an object in the foreground, but as a thing of beauty in itself. And he properly excludes from the category of true artists the fanatical school of copyists, who contend that the whole duty of artistic man is comprised in a worship of nature, without criticism or selection. To the landscape painter he points out not only what is, but what is not beautiful in sylvan scenery, at different seasons of the year. He does not hesitate to affirm that in early spring, with its crude patches of isolated green, Nature is not harmonious. Without endorsing the sarcasm of Hood, who declared Thompson's "ethereal mildness" a rank imposture, Mr. Hamerton can even indulge himself in some happy pleasantry at the cost of "gentle spring." It is to him a season which, in respect of its vegetation, "resembles nothing so much as that uncomfortable hour in the daily life of a household when some of its members, the early risers, are already walking about as if they did not quite know what to do with themselves, and others have not yet come down to breakfast." He thinks it more within the poet's than the painter's province to celebrate the charm of spring-time, and pro- ceeds to descant pleasantly on the joyousness of nature at that season of revival. At the same time, he admits that there are special beauties and effects of vegetation and atmosphere which, as Constable has taught us, belong almost exclusively to the first quarter of the sylvan year.
It is in the same spirit of liberality that the author shows, in the course of his discussion on the picturesque qualities of different trees, that there may be a high order of beauty appreciable through the eye, and yet wholly unsuited to the artist's pencil. His remarks on this quality in the horse-chestnut are valuable and just, when he attributes the landscape-painter's dislike for its strongly-marked foliage to the difficulty of "dealing with things that are countable and yet exceedingly numerous." This is felt more or less in all tree-drawing, but more especially in the case of the horse-chestnut. It is curious, however, to contrast his de- scription of this tree, when covered with blossoms, with the judgment pronounced upon it by an earlier sylvan critic, brought up amidst discussions on the philosophy of the picturesque and the art of the landscape-gardener. "The horse-chestnut," according to Mr. Hamerton, "is, in the earlier weeks of May, a sight for gods and men. If you are well outside its branches, you see the richly-painted flowers rising tier above tier on all its glorious slope, up to the odorous heights that belong to the birds and the bees ; if you are under its shadow, you walk in a soft green light, that comes through the broad-spreading leaflets. No transparencies are finer than this illumined canopy of green, and whilst the leaves are quite young and perfect, they are cut out so clearly as to have a grandly decorative effect." -Gilpin, on the other hand, in his Forest Scenery, declares that "the whole tree together in flower is a glaring object, totally unharmonious and unpicturesque." Who shall decide when doctors disagree?
As a necessary part of his subject, the author devotes some pages to the songs of birds, speculating at the outset on the nature of the delight with which even a musical ear will inhale a mingled warbling that must of necessity be full of discords, and attributing it to the prevalence of poetic sentiment over the actual sense of sound. The chapter on the nightingale, wherein he quotes Buffon's beautiful description of its song, is one of the best in the book, and contains a pretty piece of French folk-lore, invented to account for the song of Philomel being confined to the night- season. Other chapters, under the head of "June," are devoted to the consideration of sylvan poetry by writers of various ages, beginning with the classic pastorals. In comparing, as to their views of natural landscape, the Greek idyll with the Roman eclogue, and both with the poets of the early Renaissance, our critic finds more freshness in Theocritus and more finish in Virgil, but in neither the unrestrained love of rural beauty that carries Chaucer into a discursive eloquence forming strong contrast to the suggestive brevity of the classic style. But he acknowledges in all these writers a genuine feeling of nature wanting in the imitative pastorals of a later age, the Aminla of Tasso, and the French school of the eighteenth century, in which the indifference to landscape had become nearly absolute. "It was only," he says (speaking of France), "after the mania for imitating Virgil and Theocritus had completely spent itself, that the genuine modern school of pastoral art arose." But it arose, in the author's opinion, in a new form. There have been many genuine writers on rustic subjects, as Lamartine, and pre-eminently, George Sand, but the only true idyllists of the present day are those who give utterance to poetic inspiration through the medium of the sister art of painting. In illustration, he mentions 'rroyon and Rosa Bonheur as under the same rustic inspiration as Virgil, and Millet and Breton as more comparable with the classic poets in respect. of their human sympathies. It is surprising, however, that writing of French scenery and landscape art, he should nowhere 80 much as mention Corot, alike one of the most poetic of sylvan painters, and in spite of his nymphs and satyrs, one of the most affectionate of students of nature. This seems the more strange,. when we read the author's high estimate, as an element of land- scape, of Corot's favourite tree, the silver birch. In describing its lovely appearance in spring and summer as a "cloud of light foliage," he paints in words the very image constantly before the eye on Corot's canvas. With nymphs and fauns, indeed, and classic peopling of the woodlands, Mr. Hamerton has small sym- pathy, and we have naught to oppose to his condemnation of the falsehood and immorality of the classic view of rustic life. But there is yet a wide field of poetic imagining belonging to sylvan scenery which has an innocent charm for most minds, and respect- ing which he is altogether silent. The pretty fairy mythologies of Northern nations are not to be set aside as animal or human pictures, to which the hills and foliage are mere background. Tiny elves and pixies spring spontaneously from the verdure, little fairies lurk under petals and lie in bells of flowers, and even the big gnomes are born of caves and mountain glades. Has Mr. Hamerton forgotten Titania couching on her wild-thyme bank, and Ariel in the cowslip's bell, or Oberon, or Puck, that all he culls from our greatest poet is a recognition of the sadness associated with the willow ? Is there nothing in the writings of Shakespeare that possesses the essential character of a putoral idyll ?
A set of twenty-four etchings accompany the text, but have only a slight connection with it in the way of illustration. In merit they are very unequal. Some four or five, such as the group of oaks beyond a sheet of water, engraved by Greux, after T. Rousseau, which is exceedingly rich in texture, and a deli- cately drawn and life-like group of reapers by Bedouin, after Leleux, are beautiful works of art, by the side of which the author's hard etchings make but a poor show.
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