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slaves, Mr. Milner Gibson for freedom of newspapers from taxation, Mr. Cobden for Free-trade, Mr. Bright for Reform, Lord Ashley for regulation of the hours of labour, the late Lord Derby to protect the poorer classes of London when evicted by railway companies, Lord Lansdowne for religious liberty, and Sir Samuel Romilly for the amelioration of criminal law, supported by Lords Lansdowne, Grey, and Holland-that may any individual Peer do in the very many matters that have still to be dealt with by the Legislature. To name a few such questions, why should not some Peer take up and press forwards for legislation; sanitary reform, the game laws, the appointment of a public prosecutor, the adulteration of articles of food, the reduction of the national debt, the important subject of emigration; Church reform, cathedral reform, and, as Lord Grey has just suggested, law reform; abolition of the power of life and death over condemned criminals, now improperly in the hands of the Home Secretary; the question of national defence and compulsory registration for service; the whole question of capital and labour, and reduction of the hours of labour; the important subject of treaties, their ratification and duration, &c. Is it to be supposed that we should have had the Mines Regulation Bill postponed by the Government from Session to Session, if some noble lord had carried a resolution that such a bill was necessary, and, failing the Government passing such a bill, had himself passed one through the Upper House.

There are other suggestions which I should like to make, specially as to the Lords taking no bill into their consideration, except such as should be voted urgent by the House of Commons, unless it was in the Upper House one month before the day of prorogation, the Session in the Lords not necessarily being coterminous with that of the Commons; but my ignorance as to the working of our Parliamentary system leads me to doubt whether they would be practicable. few suggestions that I have ventured, with unfeigned diffidence, to make, seem to me (except, it may be, the fifth) of nature that is likely to commend

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them to those who regard the business of the House of Lords from a business

point of view. "The House of Lords, in truth, is not only a privileged body, but a great representative institution

standing out as an embodiment of the aristocratic influence and sympathies of the country." We are proud of our Peers: we can never forget that to their order we owe that which has been styled "the keystone of English liberty-equal dis tribution of civil rights to all classes of freemen:" we are proud of our House of Lords; we wish it long to continue; and continue it will, if, as in times past, it brings itself into harmony with the altered circumstances of the country. Railways have made occasional residence in London so easy, that attention to public business is within easy reach of all who are privileged to conduct it.

"Order is Heaven's first law; and this confess'd,

Some are, and must be, greater than the rest:

More rich, more wise."

This we readily accept in England: it seems to us a truism, so familiar are we with it. But "virtue is the only solid base of greatness;" moral excellence, active power, and strength, used for the public good, must ever be the claim to leadership of those who lead this country; but the same writer who bears willing witness to the fact that the dignity of the Peerage "has been well maintained by territorial power by illustrious ancestry-by noble. deeds-by learning, eloquence, and public virtues -also ominously tells of "the passive indifference of the Peers to the ordinary business of legislation, "their scant attendance,' "" their inertness," "the indolent facility" with which they have allowed one or two members of strong will to dominate over the majority, and their "impaired moral influence." Let us re

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member in time that, as Carlyle says, "there is a stillness, of passive inertness, the symptom of imminent downfall," and that "it is of apoplexy, so to speak, and a plethoric lazy habit of body, that Churches, Kingships, Social Institutions, oftenest die."

S. FLOOD PAGE.

499

TURNER AND MULREADY.

ON THE EFFECT OF CERTAIN FAULTS OF VISION ON PAINTING, WITH ESPECIAL REFERENCE TO THEIR WORKS.1

BY R. LIEBREICH, OPHTHALMIc surgeon and lecturer at ST. THOMAS'S HOSPITAL.

WHEN I arrived in England about eighteen months ago, little thinking that a short vacation tour would end in my permanent residence here, I at once paid a visit to the National Gallery. I was anxious to see Turner's pictures, which on the Continent I had had no opportunity of doing. How great was my astonishment when, after having admired his earlier works, I entered another room which contained his later paintings! Are these really by the same hand? I asked myself on first inspecting them; or have they suffered in any way? On examining them, however, more closely, a question presented itself to my mind which was to me a subject of interesting diagnosis. Was the great change which made the painter of "Crossing the Brook" afterwards produce such pictures as "Shade and Darkness," caused by an ocular or cerebral disturbance? Researches into the life of Turner could not afford an answer to this question. All that I could learn was, that during the last five years of his life his power of vision as well as his intellect had suffered. In no way, however, did this account for the changes which began to manifest themselves about fifteen years before that time. The question could therefore only be answered by a direct study of his pictures from a purely scientific, and not at all from an æsthetic or artistic point of view.

I chose for this purpose pictures belonging to the middle of the period which I consider pathological, i.e. not quite healthy, and analysed them in all their details, with regard to colour,

1 A Lecture delivered at the Royal Institution on the 8th March, 1872.

drawing, and distribution of light and shade.

It was particularly important to ascertain if the anomaly of the whole picture could be deduced from a regularly recurring fault in its details. This fault is a vertical streakiness, which is caused by every illuminated point having been changed into a vertical line. The elongation is, generally speaking, in exact proportion to the brightness of the light; that is to say, the more intense the light which diffuses itself from the illuminated point in nature, the longer becomes the line which represents it on the picture. Thus, for instance, there proceeds from the sun in the centre of a picture a vertical yellow streak, dividing it into two entirely distinct halves, which are not connected by any horizontal line. In Turner's earlier pictures, the disc of the sun is clearly defined, the light equally radiating to all parts; and even where through the reflection of water a vertical streak is produced, there appears, distinctly marked through the vertical streak of light, the line of the horizon, the demarcation of the land in the foreground, and the outline of the waves in a horizontal direction. In the pictures, however, of which I am now speaking, the tracing of any detail is perfectly effaced when it falls in the vertical streak of light. Even less illuminated objects, like houses or figures, form considerably elongated streaks of light. In this manner, therefore, houses that stand near the water, or people in a boat, blend so entirely with the reflection in the water, that the horizontal line of demarcation between house and water or boat and water entirely disappears, and all be

comes a conglomeration of vertical lines. Everything that is abnormal in the shape of objects, in the drawing, and even in the colouring of the pictures of this period, can be explained by this vertical diffusion of light.

How and at what time did this anomaly develop itself?

Till the year 1830 all is normal. In 1831 a change in the colouring becomes. for the first time perceptible, which gives to the works of Turner a peculiar character not found in any other master. Optically this is caused by an increased intensity of the diffused light proceeding from the most illuminated parts of the landscape. This light forms a haze of a bluish colour which contrasts too much with the surrounding portion in shadow. From the year 1833 this diffusion of light becomes more and more vertical. It gradually increases during the following years. At first it can only be perceived by a careful examination of the picture, but from the year 1839 the regular vertical streaks become apparent to everyone. This increases subsequently to such a degree, that when the pictures are closely examined they appear as if they had been wilfully destroyed by vertical strokes of the brush before they were dry, and it is only from a considerable distance that the object and the meaning of the picture can be comprehended. During the last years of Turner's life this peculiarity became so extreme that his pictures can hardly be understood at all.

It is a generally received opinion that Turner adopted a peculiar manner, that he exaggerated it more and more, and that his last works are the result of a deranged intellect. I am convinced of the incorrectness, I might almost say of the injustice, of this opinion. The word "manner" has a very vague meaning. In general we understand by it something which has been arbitrarily assumed by the artist. It may be the result of study, of reflection, of a development of principle, or the consequence of a chance observation, of an experiment, or of an occasional success. Nothing of all this applies to what has been called Turner's

manner. Nothing in him is arbitrary, assumed, or of set purpose. According to my opinion, his manner is exclusively the result of a change in his eyes, which developed itself during the last twenty years of his life. In consequence of it the aspect of nature gradually changed for him, while he continued in an unconscious, I might almost say in a naïve manner, to reproduce what he saw. And he reproduced it so faithfully and accurately, that he enables us distinctly to recognize the nature of the disease of his eyes, to follow its development step by step, and to prove by an optical contrivance the correctness of our diagnosis. By the aid of this contrivance we can see nature under the same aspect as he saw and represented it. With the same we can also, as I shall prove to you by an experiment, give to Turner's early pictures the appearance of those of the later period.

After he had reached the age of fifty-five, the crystalline lenses of Turner's eyes became rather dim, and dispersed the light more strongly, and in consequence threw a bluish mist over illuminated objects. This is a pathological increase of an optical effect, the existence of which, even in the normal eye, can be proved by the following experiment. 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 greyish 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 re fracting 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 Professor Tyndall, in his brilliant experi ments, demonstrated to you the imperfect transparency of water, we find that even the clearest and most beautiful is not so perfectly transparent as we would suppose. The older we get the more the transparency decreases, espe cially of the lens. But to produce

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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, whilst 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: "The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven."

Thus it seems to me perfectly natural that the peculiar poetical haze which is produced by the diffusion of light in Turner's pictures after 1831 should have a particular attraction for many of Turner's admirers. On the other hand, passing over the faults, we discover in these pictures peculiar merits, and we recognize that the great artist continued in many ways to improve, even at a time of his life when his failing sight began to deprive his works of general favour. I cannot, however, defend the opinion of those who are enraptured with Turner's pictures belonging to a still later period-who consider a picture beautiful which, in consequence of this optical defect, is entirely disfigured and defaced, and who, calling this Turner's style, would like to form it into a school and imitate it. They resemble the porter of a certain dealer in works of art, who one day, when he had to deliver the torso of a Venus at a gentleman's house, answered the servant, who had expressed his astonishment that his master should have bought a thing without head, arms, or legs, "You don't understand; that's just the beauty of it."

I show you here first a picture which is copied from an oil-painting in the South Kensington Museum. This picture was not exhibited till the year 1833, but it was painted some time before, and from sketches taken in Venice previous to any change in Turner's sight. I shall now try so to change this picture, by an optical contrivance, as to make it resemble the pictures he painted after 1839. You must, of course, not expect to see in this rough representation, which a large theatre necessitates, anything of the real beauty of Turner's pictures. Our object is to analyse their faults.

In order to show you in a single object what you have already observed in the general aspect of a picture, I choose purposely a tree, because there are no trees in the "Venice " you have just seen, and more particularly because after the year 1833 Turner painted trees that were unknown to any botanist, had never

been seen in nature, nor been painted by any other artist. I do not think it likely that Turner invented a tree he had never seen; it seems to me more probable that he painted such trees because he saw them so in nature. I searched for them with the aid of the lens, and soon discovered them. Here is a common tree; the glass changes it into a Turner tree.

Let us now turn from the individual case of a great artist to a whole category of cases, in which the works of painters are modified by anomalies in their vision-I mean cases of irregularities in the refraction of the eye. The optical apparatus of the eye forms, like the apparatus of a photographer, inverted images. In order to be seen distinctly these images must fall exactly upon the retina. The capacity of the eye to accommodate itself to different consecutive distances, so as to receive on the retina distinct images of objects, is called accommodation. This faculty depends upon the power of the crystalline lens to change its form. The accommodation is at its greatest tension if we adapt our eye to the nearest point. It is, on the contrary, in complete repose if we adapt it to the farthest point. The optical state of the eye during its adaptation for the farthest point, when every effort of accommodation is completely suspended, is called its refraction.

There are three different kinds of refraction: firstly, that of the normal eye; secondly, of the short-sighted eye; thirdly, of the over-sighted eye.

1. The normal eye, when the activity of its accommodation is perfectly suspended, is adjusted for the infinite distance; that is to say, it unites upon the retina parallel rays of light.

2. The short-sighted eye has, in consequence of an extension of its axis, a stronger refraction, and unites therefore in front of the retina the rays of light which proceed from infinite distance. In order to be united upon the retina itself the rays of light must be divergent; that is to say, they must come from a nearer point. The more short-sighted the eye is, the stronger must be the divergence; such an eye, in order to see distinctly

distant objects, must make the rays from a distant object more divergent, by aid of a concave glass. We determine the degree of short-sightedness by the power of the weakest concave glass that enables the eye to see distinctly at a great distance.

3. The over-sighted, or hypermetropic eye, on the contrary, has too weak a refraction it unites convergent rays of light upon the retina; parallel or divergent rays of light it unites behind the retina, unless an effort of accommodation is made. The degree of hypermetropy, or over-sightedness, is determined by the focal distance of the strongest convex glass with which objects can still be distinctly seen at a great distance.

Hypermetropy has no essential influence upon painting; it only reduces the power of application, and must therefore be corrected by wearing convex glasses. This can never be avoided if the hypermetropy is so great as to diminish the distinctness of vision. Short-sightedness, on the contrary, generally influences the choice of the subject of the artist and also the manner of its execution. As a very small handwriting is an indication of short-sightedness, so we find that artists who paint small pictures, and finish the details with great minuteness, and, with fine touches of the brush, are mostly short-sighted.

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Sometimes the shape of the eye diverges from its normal spherical form, and this is called astigmatism. has only been closely investigated since Airy discovered it in his own eye. Figure to yourself meridians drawn on the eye as on a globe, so that one pole is placed in front: then you can define astigmatism as a difference in the curvature of two meridians, which may, for instance, stand perpendicularly upon each other; the consequence of which is a difference in the power of refraction of the eye in the direction of the two meridians. An eye may, for instance,

have a normal refraction in its horizontal meridian, and be short-sighted in its vertical meridian. Small differences of this kind are found in almost every eye, but are not perceived. Higher degrees

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