THE SUN


Nowhere else does the greater light so rule the day, so measure, so
divide, so reign, make so imperial laws, so visibly kindle, so
immediately quicken, so suddenly efface, so banish, so restore, as in a
plain like this of Suffolk with its enormous sky. The curious have an
insufficient motive for going to the mountains if they do it to see the
sunrise. The sun that leaps from a mountain peak is a sun past the dew
of his birth; he has walked some way towards the common fires of noon.
But on the flat country the uprising is early and fresh, the arc is wide,
the career is long. The most distant clouds, converging in the beautiful
and little-studied order of cloud-perspective (for most painters treat
clouds as though they formed perpendicular and not horizontal scenery),
are those that gather at the central point of sunrise. On the plain, and
there only, can the construction--but that is too little vital a word; I
should rather say the organism--the unity, the design, of a sky be
understood. The light wind that has been moving all night is seen to
have not worked at random. It has shepherded some small flocks of cloud
afield and folded others. There's husbandry in Heaven. And the order
has, or seems to have, the sun for its midst. Not a line, not a curve,
but confesses its membership in a design declared from horizon to
horizon.

To see the system of a sky in fragments is to miss what I learn to look
for in all achieved works of Nature and art: the organism that is unity
and life. It is the unity and life of painting. The Early Victorian
picture--(the school is still in full career, but essentially it belongs
to that triumphal period)--is but a dull sum of things put together, in