The genius of Constable
Peter Conrad
Romantic genius is generally self-dramatising: identifying art with personal individuality, and removing attention from the artistic product to the emotional process which created it, romanticism encouraged the artist to think of himself as his own magnum opus. The romantic artist's work may be frustratingly scrappy like Coleridge's, or petrified by academic example like Haydon's; but that seems to ratify his greatness, not detract from it, since the man is so much larger than any poem or painting he might produce. He lives, as Keats said of Shakespeare, klife of allegory; his works are merely an occasional and partial commentary on it.
Constable's genius is peculiar in not being of this kind — he withdraws from the romantic merchandising of genius as self-advertisement into something closer to the original sense of the word. For genius meant, until its romantic corruption, an indwelling spirit, an atmosphere or tendency; and Constable's landscapes are offerings to the obscure deity of place, to the genius loci. He paints the landscape's genius, not his own, and he expressed his gratitude to the "Old rotten Banks, slimy posts & brickwork" along the Stour for making him a painter. In contrast with this humility, Turner often seems to paint landscapes in order to abolish them: his opalescent refinements and abstract maelstroms of light dissolve the substance of the scene, rescuing it from nature to make it Turner's own creation. Though the romantics are popularly taken for nature-worshippers, their attitude to nature is seldom as gratefully reverential as Constable's. Turner
incites it to storms of self-destruction, hoping to re-arrange the elements according to a plan of his own on the morning after the Apocalypse. Wordsworth seems almost indifferent to nature, and whenever his poetry notices a natural object (like the beacon and the girl with the pitcher in The Prelude) it works to reduce it to subjectivity, to make it an incident in the poet's consciousness.
The contrast between Constable's patient attentiveness, returning to scenes he had known since childhood with the regularity of daily religious observance, and the romantic ambition to re-compose landscape, can be measured in a remark of Wordsworth's about Scott's habit of taking a note-book on his walks to jot down observations as they occurred to him. He should have waited, Wordsworth said, until time had evacuated the landscape and then re-created it from memory; the picture in the mind would constitute "the ideal and essential truth of the scene". The mind colonises the landscape by eroding it, wearing it down into a replica of the bleak objectless infinity of thought. Constable, however, carried a pocket-size sketch-book with him, and fondly recorded what he saw — gravelpits or locks or a passing horse and cart — for itself, not as the captive of the mind. Wordsworth requires the landscape to acknowledge his presence: it does not exist unless he is there to observe it, and its function is to minister to him. Caspar David Friedrich, in his picture of a traveller above the mists, obscures the landscape but paints the observer inside it, as if the act of seeing had cancelled out what there was to see. Constable paints the landscape, not himself looking at it.
For Wordsworth, people had no more separate reality than the objects littered through the landscape; Lucy joins the rocks, stones and trees as undifferentiated flotsam in the stream of his consciousness; but for Constable each natural object has the resilient' individuality of a person: a gaunt suffering tree, the almost architectural majesty of a barge being built near Flatford Mill, the sullen wreck of Hadleigh Castle. Even clouds for Constable are particular, unrepeatable characters. In Turner's work they are agents of dissolution, liquefying forms which seem solid, but Constable dated and numbered his studies of them as if naming them and endowing them with personality — massed and oppressive cumulus or scratchy, mobile cirrus.
As he said, painting was Constable's way of feeling, and it is feeling which personalises his landscapes. His portraits are oddly stodgy — even the members of his family are stiff marionettes — but he has the gift of divining character in landscape. The cloudy figurations of the sky, which Constable called the "chief organ of sentiment" in landscape, come to represent its shadowy and fleeting mental life; the earth is its body: Constable's paint has a thick physical substance which contrasts with the bodilessness of Turner's style in the vvater-colours, lightly staining the paper in the hope of catching a fugitive spirit rather than coating it with a tough integument of paint as Constable does. Landscape is an organ of sentiment, but constable never allows it to become sentimental. The character he finds in landscape is stern and implacable, resisting human interference. whereas the Victorians make a nature they know to be threatening pathetically dependent
on
infusions of human emotion, sentimentalisingt in the hope of winning it over (dogs have moist maudlin eyes; flowers are made to smile winsomely or droop in self-pity), Constable discovers a certain stoical wisdom in the
insentience and indifference of nature — the spire of Salisbury Cathedral abides the pelting of a storm; a stag wanders past the cenotaph to Reynolds at Collanton, careless of the place's sacredness to art. He trusts nature as neither the romantics nor the Victorians did. Most romantic landscapes gaudily transfigure nature: to Constable, Turner's vortices of light and elemental explosions were "only visions", and when Blake praised his sketches as "not drawing but inspiration" he replied, with tetchy scepticism, that he never knew it before: "I took it for drawing". Victorian landscapes suffer from a complementary vice: they do not wash away actuality with dreamy grandiloquence, but concentrate on close technical detail as if afraid that an ampler view might confound their sentimental alliance with nature. Constable has neither the folly of the one nor the evasiveness of the other. He has a visual honesty which rejects mannerism, whereby artists pass off a version of reality — ethereal in Turner's case, myopic in that of the pre-Raphaelites — as the truth; he insists that painting should have the pitiless exactitude of science, that landscape should "be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments". His repetitiveness, returning always to that series of locations which make up for the tourist "the Constable country", is a sign not of tilt; provincial's doting affection for his native place but of the rigorous exploratory patience of the scientist, attempting to understand a natural phenomenon by watching its reactions under controlled conditions which are varied slightly in each test. Hence the debate, in the preliminary versions of the 1825 Academy picture, over whether the horse should leap or not: once it does, its heroic impulsiveness unsettles every other element in the conjunction, attracting a twisted balletic osier towards the centre in agitated sympathy, transforming the sluicegate into a pediment, a platform elevated to display a tableau of self-delighting energy.
Constable experiences nature, as a scientist might, as an equilibrium of forces: the horse strains to release its imprisoned energy, the osier and even the punt-pole exert themselves with different purposes, and composition must negotiate an accord between them. Nature is stubborn, harsh and insistent, not easily subdued by the artist: impressionists — like Monet with his molten cathedrals or disintegrating water-lilies — employ their art against nature, fragmenting it, reducing objects to phantasms of light; but Constable's nature heroically resists him. His technique is a tribute to its wilfulness and dynamism: he applies paint violently, in muddy flecks or with slashes of the palette knife. Contemporaries were offended by the discrepancy between the lazy calm of his rural subjects and the viscous seas of dark colour, or flurries of snow with which Constable's painterly manner deluged them; but this is his method of dramatising landscape. He was most moved by the battered forbearance of nature in its contest with the elements — trees bent against storms, the majestic darkness of pessimism — and he turns paint into another element, lashing and bombarding its subject, instructing it in the virtue of gloomy self-sufficiency.
From Gainsborough's fanciful scenic models rigged up in the studio to the impressionist decomposition of scenery into dots and dashes, the landscape tradition asserts art's superiority over nature: the painter while pretending to copy the world is actually re-making it. Constable is the invincible exception. His lectures even suggest that "pictures have been over-valued; held up by a blind admiration as ideal things, and almost as standards by which nature is to be judged rather than the reverse". Instead of Faustian contention with nature, the artist should "walk in the fields with an humble mind", endeavouring "to make something out of nothing, in attempting which he must of necessity become poetical". This commandment of 1824 virtually paraphrases a remark of Wordsworth's, which has a similar intention. In 'Simon Lee' Wordsworth refuses to inflate his encounter with the aged huntsman into a story, and transfers the task of discovering its significance from the dictatorial artist, who could impose a meaning if he wished, to the reader whose emotional generosity must translate the incident into a parable: 0 reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, 0 gentle reader! you would find A tale in everything.
Constable likewise refuses the temptation of narrative interference with nature, although Turner yields to it in allowing Hannibal or Dido to invade his landscapes and by presenting his pictures as extracts from a philosophical epic expounding The Fallacies of Hope. Making something out of nothing, Constable's pictures risk the appearance of insignificance: they can be and have been trivialised, made icons of commercial security by the advertising industry; but properly understood they are works which have excluded plot and, like romantic lyrical poetry, left in its place an isolated image which acquires meaning as the artist and the observer think about it. Constable questions enigmatic images like Stonehenge (which, Wordsworth said, was "proud to hint yet keep" its secrets) or the visionary dreariness of Hampstead Heath, as Keats anxiously interrogates the nightingale or the Grecian urn.
Poetry for Constable does not mean lurid manufacture of imagery, as it sometimes did for Turner, but the tentative, self-jeopardising effort of understanding. When French critics accused his landscapes of being formless and indefinite, he accepted their blame as praise and asked "what is poetry? — What is Coleridge's Ancient Mariner (the very best modern poem) but something like this?" and there is a startling aptness to his identification with the Mariner. Coleridge's hero is made to experience the sacrosanct independence of nature, tragically when he outrages it by killing the albatross, nightmarishly when in his delirium he is tormented by its wilful blazes and doldrums, and redemptively when he learns to rejoice in the self-involved play of the watersnakes. Constable's attitude to nature is similarly one of reverent, superstitious awe: he thought that "the art of seeing nature is a thing almost as much to be acquired as the art of reading the Egyptian hieroglyphics", and however familiar the signs might be they can turn unexpectedly against the observer — after his wife's death he came to share the Mariner's sense of desolation in nature, and felt "every gleam of sunshine is blighted for me".
Constable's humility is not glib and condescending, patronising nature as the Victorians did; it is earned, and even, in that tragic sombreness of colouring which his contemporaries saw as a reflex of melancholy, resentful. We ought not, he said, "be surprised at the Humility of Genius but remember that it, is Genius only — that feels humbled". His genius humbles itself the better to penetrate the ambiguous, healing but remorseless genius of nature.
Previous page
