It is first to be remembered that in every one of his English or French
drawings, Turner's mind was, in two great instincts, at variance with
itself. The _affections_ of it clung, as we have just seen, to humble
scenery, and gentle wildness of pastoral life. But the _admiration_ of
it was, more than any other artist's whatsoever, fastened on largeness
of scale. With all his heart, he was attached to the narrow meadows and
rounded knolls of England; by all his imagination he was urged to the
reverence of endless vales and measureless hills; nor could any scene be
too contracted for his love, or too vast for his ambition. Hence, when
he returned to English scenery after his first studies in Savoy and
Dauphine, he was continually endeavoring to reconcile old fondnesses
with new sublimities; and, as in Switzerland he chose rounded Alps for
the love of Yorkshire, so in Yorkshire he exaggerated scale, in memory
of Switzerland, and gave to Ingleborough, seen from Hornby Castle, in
great part the expression of cloudy majesty and height which he had seen
in the Alps from Grenoble. We must continually remember these two
opposite instincts as we examine the Turnerian topography of his subject
of Bolton Abbey.
Sec. 30. The Abbey is placed, as most lovers of our English scenery know
well, on a little promontory of level park land, enclosed by one of the
sweeps of the Wharfe. On the other side of the river, the flank of the
dale rises in a pretty wooded brow, which the river, leaning against,
has cut into two or three somewhat bold masses of rock, steep to the
water's edge, but feathered above with copse of ash and oak. Above these
rocks, the hills are rounded softly upwards to the moorland; the entire
height of the brow towards the river being perhaps two hundred feet, and
the rocky parts of it not above forty or fifty, so that the general
impression upon the eye is that the hill is little more than twice the
height of the ruins, or of the groups of noble ash trees which encircle
them. One of these groups is conspicuous above the rest, growing on the
very shore of the tongue of land which projects into the river, whose
clear brown water, stealing first in mere threads between the separate
pebbles of shingle, and eddying in soft golden lines towards its central
currents, flows out of amber into ebony, and glides calm and deep below
the rock on the opposite shore.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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