Appendix V
At the near point Vuillard painted
interiors for the most part, but sometimes also gardens. In a few compositions he managed to combine
the magic of propinquity with the magic of remoteness by representing a corner
of a room, in which there stands or hangs one of his own, or someone else's,
representation of a distant view of trees, hills, and sky. It is an invitation to make the best of both worlds, the telescopic and the microscopic, at a single
glance.
For the rest, I can
think of only a very few close-up landscapes by modern European artists. There is a strange Thicket by Van Gogh
at the Metropolitan. There is
Constable's wonderful Dell in Helmingham Park
at the Tate. There is a bad picture, Millais' Orphelia, made
magical, in spite of everything, by its intricacies of summer greenery seen
from the point of view, very nearly, of a water rat. And I remember a Delacoix,
glimpsed long ago at some Loan Exhibition, of bark and leaves and blossom at
the closest range. There must, of
course, be others; but either I have forgotten, or have never seen them. In any case there is nothing in the West
comparable to the Chinese and Japanese renderings of nature at the
near-point. A spray of blossoming plum,
eighteen inches of a bamboo stem with its leaves, tits or finches seen at
hardly more than arm's length among the bushes, all kinds of flowers and
foliage, of birds and fish and small mammals.
Each small life is represented as the centre of its own universe, the
purpose, in its own estimation, for which the world and all that is in it were
created; each issues its own specific and individual declaration of
independence from human imperialism; each, by ironic implication, derides our
absurd pretensions to lay down merely human rules for the conduct of the cosmic
game; each mutely repeats the divine tautology: I am that I am.
Nature at the middle
distance is familiar - so familiar that we are deluded into believing that we
really know what it is all about. Seen
very close at hand, or at a great distance, or from an odd angle, it seems
disquietingly strange, wonderful beyond all comprehension. The close-up landscapes of
In nature, as in a work
of art, the isolation of an object tends to invest it with absoluteness, to
endow it with that more-than-symbolic meaning which is identical with being.
But
there's a tree - of many, one -
A
single field which I have looked upon:
Both
of them speak of something that is gone.
The something which Wordsworth could no longer see was 'the
visionary gleam'. That gleam, I
remember, and that intrinsic significance were the properties of a solitary oak
that could be seen from the train, between Reading and Oxford, growing from the
summit of a little knoll in a wide expanse of ploughland,
and silhouetted against the pale northern sky.
The effects of
isolation combined with proximity may be studied, in all their magical
strangeness, in an extraordinary painting by a seventeenth-century Japanese
artist, who was also a famous swordsman and a student of Zen. It represents a butcher bird, perched on the
very tip of a naked branch, 'waiting without purpose, but in the state of
highest tension'. Beneath, above, and
all around is nothing. The bird emerges
from the Void, from that eternal namelessness and formlessness, which is yet
the very substance of the manifold, concrete, and transient universe. That shrike on its bare branch is first cousin
to Hardy's wintry thrush. But whereas the Victorian thrush insists on
teaching us some kind of a lesson, the Far Eastern butcher bird is content
simply to exist, to be intensely and absolutely there.