Turner[1] was one day painting a landscape with the richness of color that was his specialty, when an English girl who was painting near him left her easel and came to look over his shoulder. “Why, Mr. Turner,” said she, “I don’t see any of those colors in the grass or the trees.”
“No?” said Turner. “Don’t you wish you could?”
It is astonishing that with so much of beauty as there is around us, so many people are found who travel through the world without having used their eyes to any profit whatever. The training needs to be begun in early life; children should be taught how to observe; and as some are duller than others they need to have things pointed out to them, until the habit of examining closely becomes fixed, and like second nature.
What a wonderful field for study there is in the sky above us! Look at the clouds; here, in great, heavy masses; there assuming strange shapes, and taking on an infinite variety of coloring. See the setting sun; never twice alike; a marvel of beauty and grandeur; a feast for even young eyes.
Let us go down by the seashore and watch the great waves come in. The sea is broad, and grand, and deep; but is that all? Note how it reflects the color of the sky; mark the waves that rise afar, and show their white manes like wild horses of the sea, and dash on the shore like a charge of cavalry. How they come galloping, galloping on! Watch for the ninth wave, and look out for yourself! Observe the height that each succeeding wave obtains when the tide is on the rise, and how the character of the beach is changed after a severe storm of wind or rain. There is a volume of interesting study in a handful of sand, a tuft of moss, a small patch of grass, or a bunch of seaweed.
Ruskin,[2] that exceedingly close observer of art and nature, and eminently sharp critic of men and things, gives us some excellent instruction in the art of looking below the surface. “There is no bush,” he says, “on the face of the globe exactly like another bush; there are no two trees in the forest whose boughs bend into the same network, nor two leaves on the same tree which could not be told one from the other, nor two waves in the sea exactly alike. And out of this mass of various yet agreeing beauty, it is by long attention only that the conception of the constant character—the ideal form—hinted at by all, yet assumed by none, is fixed upon the imagination for its standard of truth. Ask the connoisseur, who has scampered over all Europe, the shape of the leaf of an elm, and the chances are ninety to one that he can not tell you, and yet he will be voluble of criticism on every painted landscape from Dresden to Madrid, and pretend to tell you whether they are like nature or not. A man may recognize the portrait of his friend, though he can not, if you ask him apart, tell you the shape of his nose or the height of his forehead.