Take another instance from the section on the sea ("Truth of Water," this being the description of a picture, the "Slave Ship"). Again I italicize the passages to which I wish to call attention as demanding analysis and criticism. "It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain-clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night. The whole surface of the sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high nor local, but a broad heaving of the whole ocean like the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath after the torture of the storm. Between these two ridges the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendor of which burns like gold and bathes like blood. Purple and blue the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast on the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, and, cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea. Í believe, if I were reduced to rest Turner's claim to immortality upon any single work, I should choose this. Its daring conception-ideal in the highest sense of the word—is fused on the purest truth and wrought out with the concentrated knowledge of a life. . . and the whole picture is dedicated to the most sublime of subjects and impressions,- (completing thus the perfect system of all truth which we have shown to be formed by Turner's works)—the power, majesty, and deathfulness of the open, deep illimitable sea." "Burns like gold and bathes like blood" is, of course, again for alliteration; "Purple and blue the lurid shadows," etc., part for the sing of the sentence and part poetic imagination utterly unsuggested and unsuggestable by painting; "that fearful hue," etc., to "multitudinous sea," is simply fine writing which, when it conveys a false impression, or no impression legitimate to its professed purpose, is a literary vice, as it is in this case, where the purpose is the description of a picture. Ruskin supposes this picture to be an attempt to portray the deep sea, but neither he nor Turner was ever out of soundings: how should one paint, or the other recognize, the fathomless as distinguished from the shallow seas? The fact is that the sea in the "Slave Ship" is a long ground-swell, resembling the watery mountains one may see on the open Atlantic no more than the water below a rapid. This form of swell and the "hollow breakers" are never found except when the sea is shoaling. In the deep Atlantic after a long gale, such as Ruskin supposes (I have seen it at its worst once only in 70,000 miles, more or less, of ocean travel by sail and steam), the great waves lift to heights such that Turner's "Slave Ship" would be hidden between two of them. They hang over you like impending doom, and just when you think that the ship must be buried in VOL. XXXV.-51-52. five seconds, the forefoot of the wave reaches you, and the ship suddenly begins to rise, and in another five seconds you are on the summit looking out over the heaving expanse, black, save as it is foam-driven, fitfully rising and falling, apparently without law or order, and after being poised an instant you feel the ship going from under you again, your breath almost leaves you with the rapidity of the descent, and you are buried once more in the deep trough of the sea for another brief space. Out of the flanks of these great waves jump and start, fitfully and unaccountably, lesser hillocks, to drop and disappear again; but when the crest of one comes towards you, you see no hollow breaker, for the crest simply pitches forward and slides down the slope - there is no combing. Then, as to truth, Turner's whole picture is a flagrant falsehood. The most gorgeous colors of a sunset are painted in a sky where the sun has still half an hour or more to sink to the horizon; and this license the artist habitually took, although, as every artist knows, these colors never come till after sunset. The clouds are not the "torn and streaming rainclouds" of an after-storm sky, but full-bellied, rolling wind-clouds, so far as they are structurally true to anything; subtly modeled and modulated, but as a whole as utterly impossible a sky as the sea is an utterly impossible sea. It is a marvelous picture: I do not yield to Ruskin in admiration of it as art, or admire it less for its daring license and contempt of nature's details; one can only say that it is magnificent, but it is not nature. Ruskin's feeling as to art may have been, au fond, correct; but it was so disturbed and perverted by his theories and the settled conviction that art was simply the uncompromising rendering of nature as she appears to the bodily vision, that he left out of all consideration the subjective transformation of natural truth which is the basis of art; or, if he reckoned it in, it was to persuade himself that it was due to a peculiarity of vision in the painter. It is impossible to reconcile all the inconsistencies into which this theory led him, such as the exaltation of painters who were mere naturalists, like Brett, or utterly unimaginative realists, like Holman Hunt, and the extraordinary judgment which he pronounced on Millais in his pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism,- which phase of art he desired to consider the consequence of his teaching, though, as I have heard Rossetti say, none of the Brotherhood had ever read ten pages of his writing before Ruskin had constituted himself their advocate. In some respects this little book may be considered the summing up of his art teachings, and the violence done to logic and art alike in his par allel between Millais and Turner is the clearest statement of his errors we possess. The function of the painter is here defined clearly and chiefly to be topographer and historian. . . I branches, the veins in the pebbles, the bubbles in the stream; but he can remember nothing and invent nothing. Patiently he sets himself his mighty task; abandoning at once all thought of seizing transient effects, or giving general impressions of that which his eyes Suppose that, after disciplining themselves so as to present to him in microscopical dissection, he chooses some small portion out of the infinite scene, and calcube able to draw with unerring precision each the par- lates with courage the number of weeks which must ticular kind of subject in which he most delighted, they elapse before he can do justice to the intensity of his had separated into two great armies of historians and perceptions or the fullness of matter in his subject. naturalists; that the first had painted with absolute Meanwhile the other has been watching the change of faithfulness every edifice, every city, every battle-field, the clouds and the march of the light along the mounevery scene of the slightest historical interest, precisely tain-sides; he beholds the whole scene in broad, soft and completely rendering their aspect at the time; and that their companions, according to their several pow- sight is in some sort an ad antage to him in making him masses of true gradation, and the very feebleness of his ers, had painted with like fidelity the plants and animals, more sensible of the aërial mystery of distance and hidthe natural scenery and the atmospherical phenomena of every country on the earth; suppose that a faith-g from him the multitudes of circumstances which it would have been impossible for him to represent. ful and complete record were now in our museums of have supposed the feebleness of sight in this last and every building destroyed by war, or time, or innovation of invention in the first painter, that the contrast beduring these last 200 years; suppose that each recess tween them may be the more striking; but with very of every mountain chain of Europe had been pen- slight modification both the characters are real. Grant etrated and its rocks drawn with such accuracy that to the first considerable inventive power with exquisite the geologist's diagram was no longer necessary; sense of color, and give to the second, in addition to suppose that every tree of the forest had been drawn all his other faculties, the eye of an eagle, and the first in its noblest aspect, every beast of the field in its savis John Everett Millais, the second Joseph Mallord age life — that all these gatherings were already in our William Turner." "And thus Pre-Raphaelitism and national galleries, and that the painters of the present Raphaelitism and Turnerism are all one and the same day were laboring happily and earnestly to multiply thing, so far as education can influence them; they are them and put such knowledge more and more within different in their choice, different in their faculties, but reach of the common people,- would not that be a all the same in this, that Raphael himself, so far as he more honorable life for them than gaining precarious was great, and all who preceded or followed him who bread by 'bright effects '?" ever were great, became so by painting the truths around them as they appeared to each man's mind, not who made both him and them." as he had been taught to see them except by the God been the basis of Ruskin's instruction One may reply, safely enough, that such a career is honorable in the sense that it is honest, but if the honor is that of which artists are most ambitious, it is equally safe to say that there is very little of it to be gained in that life. And this method of study has always -instruction for this and other reasons utterly wasted so far as the proper cultivation of art is concerned. I remember how, when Ruskin's drawing-book was published, an artist whose feeling for all the nobler qualities of art I have rarely known equaled, and a personal friend and admirer of Ruskin, said to me, "He should not have printed that; we know now just what he does not know." It is not so much that he ignores the greater gifts, but that he conceives that they can be trained or developed by this kind of antlike proceeding, going over the earth as an insect, not even as a bird. But it is in the comparison of the two painters whom he chooses as types that we most clearly recognize the failure to distinguish between the two forms of so-called art. "Suppose, for instance, two men, equally honest, equally industrious, equally impressed with a humble desire to render some part of what they saw in nature faithfully, and otherwise trained in convictions such as I have above endeavored to induce. But one of them is quiet in temperament, has a feeble memory, no invention, and excessively keen sight. The other is impatient in temperament, has a memory which nothing escapes, an invention which never rests, and is comparatively near-sighted. Set them both free in the same field in a mountain valley. One sees everything, small and large, with almost the same clearness; mountains and grasshoppers alike; the leaves on the And yet, between the first and the last sentences which I have quoted, the author has gone through a detailed account of the development of Turner's art, showing that it was a continuous evolution of conventional forms of treatment borrowed from earlier painters. He is obliged, to complete his antithesis, to suppose Turner feeble of sight, because he could in no other way consistent with his theory (and everything is always bent to his theories) account for his ignoring "the multitudes of circumstances which it would have been impossible for him to represent," whereas the simple fact was that Turner had, as he afterwards admits, an eagle's eye, and simply ignored whatever in nature did not suit his purpose. Turner was bred on conventions; he began in the style of the men about him, Girtin and his kind; he went through the schools of Loutherbourg, Poussin, Claude, Vandervelde, imitating everybody except the most naturalistic of the Dutchmen, but never from the beginning to the end of his career painting from nature, or in any other way than from memory, and always in a conventional manner very much influenced by the early landscape painters of the true subjective school, to which he belonged in character, faculties, and method; while Millais was a naturalist, who had no invention, no idealism, but was, and is, always working imitatively, and from direct vision, which Turner never did. Turner was influenced, and happily, by Claude to the last day of his life, though not always obeying the influence to the same apparent degree. Of Ruskin the writer, aside from the art critic, it is surely superfluous for me to say anything for mastery of our language, the greater authorities long ago have given him his place; the multitude of petty critics and pinchbeck rhetoricians who pay him the tribute of tawdry imitation is the ever-present testimony to his power and masterhood. Probably no prose writer of this century has had so many choice extracts made from his writings, -passages of gorgeous description, passionate exhortation, pathetic appeal, or apostolic denunciation; and certainly no one has so molded the style of all the writers of a class as he, for there scarcely can be found a wouldbe art critic who does not struggle to fill his throat with Ruskin's thunders, so that a flood of Ruskin and water-threatens all taste and all study of art. As an example of his diction take the description of "Schaffhausen": "Stand for half an hour beside the Fall of Schaffhausen, on the north side where the rapids are long, and watch how the vault of water first bends, unbroken in pure polished velocity, over the arching rocks at the brow of the cataract, covering them with a dome of crystal twenty feet thick, so swift that its motion is unseen except when a foam globe from above darts over it like a falling star; and how the trees are lighted above it under all their leaves at the instant that it breaks into foam; and how all the hollows of that foam burn with green fire like so much shattering chrysoprase; and how ever and anon, startling you with its white flash, a jet of spray leaps hissing out of the fall like a rocket, bursting in the wind and driven away in dust, filling the air with light; and how, through the curdling wreaths of the restless crashing abyss below, the blue of the water, paled by the foam in its body, shows purer than the sky through white rain-cloud; while the shuddering iris stoops in tremulous stillness over all, fading and flushing alternately through the choking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding itself at last among the thick golden leaves, which toss to and fro in sympathy with the wild water; their dripping masses, lifted at intervals, like sheaves of loaded corn, by some stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again upon the mossy rocks as its roar dies away; the dew gushing from their thick branches through drooping clusters of emerald herbage, and sparkling in white threads along the dark rocks of the shore, feeding the lichens which chase and chequer them with purple and silver." In the expression of what may be seen in a waterfall, and the suggestion of what may be felt, but seen by no bodily eye, is there any thing in our language that is comparable to this? But is it fair to ask art to realize it? Who shall paint "the shuddering iris fading and flushing alternately through the choking spray and shattered sunshine"? It is beyond the province of art to emulate this vein of feeling, as much as to paint Shelley's "flames mingling with sunset." But how many hapless phaetons has our Apollo of the pen thus sent tumbling down on us, entangled in their "predicates and six," or sixty! Description à la Ruskin has become a disease of the literature of the generation, and your novelist coolly stops you in the crisis of his story to describe a sunset in two or three pages which, when all is said, compare with Ruskin as a satyr with Hyperion. 66 III. THUS Ruskin obstinately bent all his conclusions and observations to his doctrines — what he wanted to see he saw, nothing else. The summer before going to England I had painted a picture in what I believed the spirit of his teachings, being then one of the most enthusiastic of his disciples. I had conceived a death-struggle between a hunter and a buck, in which they had fallen together over a ledge of rock and lay in death at its foot. I had searched the forest around where I camped in the Adirondacks until I found the ledge which suited the conception, and painted it carefully with the red sunset light coming aslant through the forest and falling on the perpendicular cliff, at the foot of which was a dense, dank growth of ferns,- all painted on the spot and in the sunset light. At the foot, where they would fall, I put my guide, locked with a huge buck, and painted them as carefully as I knew how,- the man from life and the buck immediately after I had killed him. I took it with me to London, and one day Ruskin came into my studio, and, seeing the picture, exclaimed with a gesture of disgust, Why do you have this stinking carrion in your picture? Put it out, it's filthy, it stinks!" etc. I was too much under his influence to weigh his judgment against mine, and painted it out accordingly. Dante Rossetti, who had seen and liked the picture as it was, coming in again a few days after, exclaimed, "What have you done to your picture?" I explained, and with strong irritation in his manner he replied, "You 've spoiled your picture," and walked straight out of the room. I had spoiled it, for everything in it had been chosen and painted with reference to this deadly duel, with which Ruskin had no sympathy. Death oppressed him, whence his annoyance with the picture; but that he was olfactorily impressed as he was only could be explained by the fact that, as always, he felt what he imagined or wished to see. He wanted to see truth in Turner's drawings, and he made his truth accordingly. I can but regard his influence on modern landscape painting as pernicious from beginning to end, and coinciding as it did with the advent of a great naturalistic and, therefore, anti-artistic, tendency in all branches of study, it was even more disastrous than it would have been in ordinary circumstances. His architectural work, "Stones of Venice," etc., I am not so competent to judge, but I believe that while on the one hand he did great good by bringing out the virtues of Gothic architecture and awakening the interest of the world in the art that was passing away, on the other hand he did harm by repressing the influence of the better form of Renaissance, which is often of the noblest and truest art, and is far more adapted to our modern ways of work and uses than is the Gothic. He uses here the same bitter polemics and biased judg. ment as in the "Modern Painters." In the lovely little Renaissance church of the Miracoli at Venice, where are the most exquisite decorations in the style of which I know, Ruskin finds among the arabesques a child's head tied by its locks among the tendrils of the vegetation, and inveighs bitterly against the brutality of such a conception as putting a bodiless head in the decoration. But he never stops to think that it is a cherub among other cherubim, and that, as it is in the character of the cherub to have no body, the tying of one of them by the hair to the vine is only a bit of playful invention in which there is no brutality whatever, but the most seraphic of practical jokes by the other cherubim on the bodiless and helpless state of the charming little creature, a creation which in Gothic days might have been believed in as an actuality, but which the Renaissance only looked at as a fiction of mythology with the Tritons and Sirens, and therefore with no reverence. But with Greek art, all that in any way sympathized with its dominant character meets his anathema. It seems to me that even in architecture his influence is not catholic, but is tinged by his devotional tendencies, although he introduces an element of common sense into the criticism of architecture unknown before him. But Ruskin's true position is higher than that of art critic in any possible development. It is as a moralist and a reformer and in his passionate love of humanity (not inconsistent with much bitterness, and even unmerited, at times, to individual men) that we must recognize him. His place is in the pulpit, speaking largely and in the unsectarian sense. Truth is multiform, but of one essence, and, such as he sees it, he is always faithful to it. I have taken large exception to his ideas and teachings in respect to art because I feel that they are misleading. His mistakes in art are in some measure due to his fundamental mistake of measuring it by its moral powers and influence, and the roots of the error are so deeply involved in his character and mental development that it can never be uprooted. It is difficult for me (perhaps for any of his contemporaries) to judge him as a whole because, besides being his contemporary and a sufferer by what I now perceive to be the fatal error of his system, I was for so many years his close personal friend, and because, while I do not agree with his tenets and am obliged by my own sense of right to combat many of his teachings, I still retain the personal affection for him of those years which are dear to memory, and reverence the man as I know him; and because I most desire that he should be judged rightly,—as a man who for moral greatness has few equals in his day, and who deserves an honor and distinction which he has not received, and in a selfish and sordid world will not receive, but which I believe time will give him,-that of being one who gave his whole life and substance to the furtherance of what he believed to be the true happiness and elevation of his fellow-men. Even were he the sound art critic so many people take him to be, his real nature rises above that office as much as humanity rises above art. When we wish to compare him with men of his kind, it must be with Plato or Savonarola rather than with Hazlitt or Hamerton. Art cannot be clearly estimated in any connection with morality, and Ruskin could never, any more than Plato or Savonarola, escape the condition of being in every fiber of his nature a moralist and not an artist, and as he advanced in life the ethical side of his nature more and more asserted its mastery, though less and less in theological terms. If I have assumed the right to pass judgment on his art teachings, it is because I have devoted most of my life to the study of art and more years than Ruskin had when he finished his most important books; but when I come to the moral problem, so vast, so profound and momentous in comparison with any questions of culture, I have not the presumption to judge a man whose moral nature I know to be so exceptional, and winged to flights that I can only honor from below. Here we enter into a world where only the Judge of all life can pronounce and where my opinion must be respectful, for the unquestionable loftiness and unselfishness of his nature and the consecration of his life to the advancement of truth as he has seen it, give him, to me, an authority I dare not debate with, and which I insist on all the more because I know the world does not accord it to him. No one has yet dared answer Pilate, and I have no disposition to judge whether Ruskin's social reforms and political theories are in accordance with eternal truth or not - whether they are practical or not is, perhaps, a question of epoch simply. As an indication of Ruskin's position,more free, possibly, because more personal than those given in his early works,-I quote part of one of his first letters to me (about 1851). I had been involved in mystical speculation, partly growing out of the second volume of "Modern Painters," and had written to him for counsel. doing: mingle some physical science with your imaginative studies: and be sure that God will take care has ready for you, and will show you what they are in to lead you into the fulfillment of whatever Tasks he his own time. "Thank you for your sketch of American art. I do hope that your countrymen will look upon it, in time, as all other great nations have looked upon it at their greatest times, as an object for their united aim and strongest efforts. I apprehend that their deficiency in landscape has a deep root- the want of historical associations. Every year of your national existence will give more power to your landscape painting - then — fed with Ruins of Abbeys. I believe the first thing you do you not want architecture? Our children's taste is have to do is to build a few Arabic palaces by way of novelty-one brick of jacinth and one of jasper. I can be of use to you I could not quote from his published works so condensed a summary of the creed of the man: it maintains the supremacy of the moral element which has obtained in his life-work taken as a whole. "I did not indeed understand the length to which your views were carried when I saw you here, or I should have asked you much more about them than I did, and your present letter leaves me still thus far in the dark that I do not know whether you only have a strong conviction that there is such a message to be received from all things or whether in any sort you think you have understood and can interpret it, for how otherwise should your persuasion of the fact be so strong? I never thought of such a thing being possible before, and now that you have suggested it to me I can only imagine that by rightly understanding as much of the nature of everything as ordinary watchfulness will enable any man to perceive, we might, if we looked for it, find in everything some special moral lesson or type of particular truth, and that then one might find a language in the whole world before unfelt like that which is forever given to the Ravens or to the lilies of the field by Christ's speaking of them. This I think you might very easily accomplish so far as to give the first idea and example; then it seems to me that every thoughtful man who succeeded you would be able to add some types or words to the new language, but all this quite independently of any Mystery in the Thing or Inspiration in the Person, any more than there is Mystery in the cleaning of a Room covered with dust -of which you remember Bunyan makes so beautiful a spiritual application, so that one can never more see the thing done without being interested. If there be mystery in things requiring Revelation, I cannot tell on what terms it might be vouchsafed us, nor in any way help you to greater certainty of conviction, but my advice to you would be on no account to agitate nor grieve yourself nor look for inspiration-for assuredly many of our noblest English minds have been entirely overthrown by doing so but to go on doing what you are quite sure is right - that is, striving for constant purity of thought, purpose and word:-not on any account over working yourself-especially in headwork: but accustoming yourself to look for the spiritual meaning of things just as easily to be seen as their natural meaning: and fortifying yourself against the hardening effect of your society, by good literature. You should read much-and generally old books: but above all avoid German books and all Germanists except Carlyle, whom read as much as you can or like: Read George Herbert and Spenser and Wordsworth and Homer, all constantly: Young's Night Thoughts, Crabbe—and of course Shakespeare, Bacon and Jeremy Taylor and Bunyan: do not smile if I mention also Robinson Crusoe and the Arabian Nights, for standard places on your shelves: I say read Homer: I do not know if you can read Greek, but I think it He considers himself the pupil of Carlyle — would be healthy work for you to teach it to yourself for me he floats in a purer air than Carlyle ever if you cannot, and then I would add to my list Platobreathed. As a feminine nature he was captibut I cannot conceive a good translation of Plato. I vated by the robust masculine force of his had nearly forgotten one of the chief of all- Dante. But in doing this, do not strive to keep yourself in an great countryman, and there was in the imperial elevated state of spirituality. No man who earnestly theory of Carlyle much that chimed with Rusbelieved in God and the next world was ever petrified kin's own ideas of human government. The or materialized in heart, whatever society he kept. Do in Chelsean regretfully looking back to the day of absolutism and brutal domination of the appointed king was in a certain sense a sympathetic reply to Ruskin's longings for a firm and orderly government when he felt the quicksands of the transitional order of the day yield whatever you can, however simple or commonplace, your art; do not force your spirituality on your American friends. Try to do what they admire as well as they would have it, unless it costs you too much but do not despise it because commonplace. Do not strive to do what you feel to be above your strength. God requires that of no man: Do what you feel happy in That comparatively few people have read the "Fors Clavigera" I know, for having occasion to complete my set not long since, I found that several of the numbers supplied me by the publisher were from the first thousand, published years ago; and yet this is the work which more than any other gives us a clear insight into the character and mental tendencies of Ruskin. He is here at his ease, not bound by any prepossessions and theories; wayward, outspoken, indifferent to praise or blame; speaking with full possession of himself and frank appreciation of his audience, addressing himself" to the workmen and laborers of Great Britain," not so much in the hope that they would come to fill his school, but beCause he knew that only by the poor and the despised by the great world was there any hope of the reconstruction of society, as he dreamed it, being effected or accepted. The drift of all Ruskin's preaching (and I use the word in its noble sense) is a protest against materialism in ourselves, impurity in our studies and desires, and selfishness in our conduct towards our fellow-men. |