Selections From the Works of John Ruskin Part 10

[91] _Odyssey_, 6. 162.

[92] _Odyssey_, 6. 291-292.

[93] _Odyssey_, 10. 510. [Ruskin.]

[94] Compare the pa.s.sage in Dante referred to above, p. 60.

[Ruskin.]

[95] _Iliad_, 4. 482-487.

[96] Pollards, trees polled or cut back at some height above the ground, producing a thick growth of young branches in a rounded ma.s.s.

[97] Quoted, with some omission, from chapter 12.

[98] _Odyssey_, 11. 572; 24. 13. The couch of Ceres, with Homer's usual faithfulness, is made of a _ploughed_ field, 5. 127.

[Ruskin.]

[99] _Odyssey_, 12. 45.

[100] _Odyssey_, 4. 605.

[101] _Iliad_, 21. 351.

[102] _Odyssey_, 5. 398, 463. [Ruskin.]

[103] _Odyssey_, 12. 357. [Ruskin.]

[104] _Odyssey_, 5. 481-493.

[105] _Odyssey_, 9. 132, etc. Hence Milton's

From haunted spring, and dale, Edged with poplar pale. [Ruskin.]

_Hymn on The Morning of Christ's Nativity_, 184-185.

[106] _Odyssey_, 9. 182.

[107] _Odyssey_, 10. 87-88.

[108] _Odyssey_, 13. 236, etc. [Ruskin.]

[109] Educated, as we shall see hereafter, first in this school.

Turner gave the hackneyed composition a strange power and freshness, in his Glaucus and Scylla. [Ruskin.]

[110] Flodden, Flodden Field, a plain in Northumberland, famous as the battlefield where James IV of Scotland was defeated by an English army under the Earl of Surrey, Sept. 9, 1513. The sixth canto of Scott's _Marmion_ gives a fairly accurate description of the action.

_Chevy-Chase_, a famous old English ballad recounting the incidents of the battle of Otterburn [Aug. 19, 1388] in which the Scots under the Earl of Douglas defeated the English under the Percies.

[111] Shenstone's _Rural Elegance_, 201 ff., quoted with some slight inaccuracies.

OF MODERN LANDSCAPE

VOLUME III, CHAPTER 16

We turn our eyes, therefore, as boldly and as quickly as may be, from these serene fields and skies of mediaeval art, to the most characteristic examples of modern landscape. And, I believe, the first thing that will strike us, or that ought to strike us, is _their cloudiness_.

Out of perfect light and motionless air, we find ourselves on a sudden brought under sombre skies, and into drifting wind; and, with fickle sunbeams flas.h.i.+ng in our face, or utterly drenched with sweep of rain, we are reduced to track the changes of the shadows on the gra.s.s, or watch the rents of twilight through angry cloud. And we find that whereas all the pleasure of the mediaeval was in _stability, definiteness_, and _luminousness_, we are expected to rejoice in darkness, and triumph in mutability; to lay the foundation of happiness in things which momentarily change or fade; and to expect the utmost satisfaction and instruction from what it is impossible to arrest, and difficult to comprehend.

We find, however, together with this general delight in breeze and darkness, much attention to the real form of clouds, and careful drawing of effects of mist; so that the appearance of objects, as seen through it, becomes a subject of science with us; and the faithful representation of that appearance is made of primal importance, under the name of aerial perspective. The aspects of sunset and sunrise, with all their attendant phenomena of cloud and mist, are watchfully delineated; and in ordinary daylight landscape, the sky is considered of so much importance, that a princ.i.p.al ma.s.s of foliage, or a whole foreground, is unhesitatingly thrown into shade merely to bring out the form of a white cloud. So that, if a general and characteristic name were needed for modern landscape art, none better could be invented than "the service of clouds."

And this name would, unfortunately, be characteristic of our art in more ways than one. In the last chapter, I said that all the Greeks spoke kindly about the clouds, except Aristophanes; and he, I am sorry to say (since his report is so unfavourable), is the only Greek who had studied them attentively. He tells us, first, that they are "great G.o.ddesses to idle men"; then, that they are "mistresses of disputings, and logic, and monstrosities, and noisy chattering"; declares that whoso believes in their divinity must first disbelieve in Jupiter, and place supreme power in the hands of an unknown G.o.d "Whirlwind"; and, finally, he displays their influence over the mind of one of their disciples, in his sudden desire "to speak ingeniously concerning smoke."[112]

There is, I fear, an infinite truth in this Aristophanic judgment applied to our modern cloud-wors.h.i.+p. a.s.suredly, much of the love of mystery in our romances, our poetry, our art, and, above all, in our metaphysics, must come under that definition so long ago given by the great Greek, "speaking ingeniously concerning smoke." And much of the instinct, which, partially developed in painting, may be now seen throughout every mode of exertion of mind,--the easily encouraged doubt, easily excited curiosity, habitual agitation, and delight in the changing and the marvellous, as opposed to the old quiet serenity of social custom and religious faith,--is again deeply defined in those few words, the "dethroning of Jupiter," the "coronation of the whirlwind."

Nor of whirlwind merely, but also of darkness or ignorance respecting all stable facts. That darkening of the foreground to bring out the white cloud, is, in one aspect of it, a type of the subjection of all plain and positive fact, to what is uncertain and unintelligible. And, as we examine farther into the matter, we shall be struck by another great difference between the old and modern landscape, namely, that in the old no one ever thought of drawing anything but as well _as he could_. That might not be _well_, as we have seen in the case of rocks; but it was as well as he _could_, and always distinctly. Leaf, or stone, or animal, or man, it was equally drawn with care and clearness, and its essential characters shown. If it was an oak tree, the acorns were drawn; if a flint pebble, its veins were drawn; if an arm of the sea, its fish were drawn; if a group of figures, their faces and dresses were drawn--to the very last subtlety of expression and end of thread that could be got into the s.p.a.ce, far off or near.

But now our ingenuity is all "concerning smoke." Nothing is truly drawn but that; all else is vague, slight, imperfect; got with as little pains as possible. You examine your closest foreground, and find no leaves; your largest oak, and find no acorns; your human figure, and find a spot of red paint instead of a face; and in all this, again and again, the Aristophanic words come true, and the clouds seem to be "great G.o.ddesses to idle men."

The next thing that will strike us, after this love of clouds, is the love of liberty. Whereas the mediaeval was always shutting himself into castles, and behind fosses, and drawing brickwork neatly, and beds of flowers primly, our painters delight in getting to the open fields and moors; abhor all hedges and moats; never paint anything but free-growing trees, and rivers gliding "at their own sweet will"; eschew formality down to the smallest detail; break and displace the brickwork which the mediaeval would have carefully cemented; leave unpruned the thickets he would have delicately trimmed; and, carrying the love of liberty even to license, and the love of wildness even to ruin, take pleasure at last in every aspect of age and desolation which emanc.i.p.ates the objects of nature from the government of men;--on the castle wall displacing its tapestry with ivy, and spreading, through the garden, the bramble for the rose.

Connected with this love of liberty we find a singular manifestation of love of mountains, and see our painters traversing the wildest places of the globe in order to obtain subjects with craggy foregrounds and purple distances. Some few of them remain content with pollards and flat land; but these are always men of third-rate order; and the leading masters, while they do not reject the beauty of the low grounds, reserve their highest powers to paint Alpine peaks or Italian promontories. And it is eminently noticeable, also, that this pleasure in the mountains is never mingled with fear, or tempered by a spirit of meditation, as with the mediaeval; but it is always free and fearless, brightly exhilarating, and wholly unreflective; so that the painter feels that his mountain foreground may be more consistently animated by a sportsman than a hermit; and our modern society in general goes to the mountains, not to fast, but to feast, and leaves their glaciers covered with chicken-bones and egg-sh.e.l.ls.

Connected with this want of any sense of solemnity in mountain scenery, is a general profanity of temper in regarding all the rest of nature; that is to say, a total absence of faith in the presence of any deity therein. Whereas the mediaeval never painted a cloud, but with the purpose of placing an angel in it; and a Greek never entered a wood without expecting to meet a G.o.d in it; we should think the appearance of an angel in the cloud wholly unnatural, and should be seriously surprised by meeting a G.o.d anywhere. Our chief ideas about the wood are connected with poaching. We have no belief that the clouds contain more than so many inches of rain or hail, and from our ponds and ditches expect nothing more divine than ducks and watercresses.

Finally: connected with this profanity of temper is a strong tendency to deny the sacred element of colour, and make our boast in blackness.

For though occasionally glaring or violent, modern colour is on the whole eminently sombre, tending continually to grey or brown, and by many of our best painters consistently falsified, with a confessed pride in what they call chaste or subdued tints; so that, whereas a mediaeval paints his sky bright blue and his foreground bright green, gilds the towers of his castles, and clothes his figures with purple and white, we paint our sky grey, our foreground black, and our foliage brown, and think that enough is sacrificed to the sun in admitting the dangerous brightness of a scarlet cloak or a blue jacket.

These, I believe, are the princ.i.p.al points which would strike us instantly, if we were to be brought suddenly into an exhibition of modern landscapes out of a room filled with mediaeval work. It is evident that there are both evil and good in this change; but how much evil, or how much good, we can only estimate by considering, as in the former divisions of our inquiry, what are the real roots of the habits of mind which have caused them.

And first, it is evident that the t.i.tle "Dark Ages," given to the mediaeval centuries, is, respecting art, wholly inapplicable. They were, on the contrary, the bright ages; ours are the dark ones. I do not mean metaphysically, but literally. They were the ages of gold; ours are the ages of umber.

This is partly mere mistake in us; we build brown brick walls, and wear brown coats, because we have been blunderingly taught to do so, and go on doing so mechanically. There is, however, also some cause for the change in our own tempers. On the whole, these are much _sadder_ ages than the early ones; not sadder in a n.o.ble and deep way, but in a dim wearied way,--the way of ennui, and jaded intellect, and uncomfortableness of soul and body. The Middle Ages had their wars and agonies, but also intense delights. Their gold was dashed with blood; but ours is sprinkled with dust. Their life was inwoven with white and purple: ours is one seamless stuff of brown. Not that we are without apparent festivity, but festivity more or less forced, mistaken, embittered, incomplete--not of the heart. How wonderfully, since Shakspere's time, have we lost the power of laughing at bad jests! The very finish of our wit belies our gaiety.

The profoundest reason of this darkness of heart is, I believe, our want of faith. There never yet was a generation of men (savage or civilized) who, taken as a body, so wofully fulfilled the words "having no hope, and without G.o.d in the world,"[113] as the present civilized European race. A Red Indian or Otaheitan savage has more sense of a Divine existence round him, or government over him, than the plurality of refined Londoners and Parisians: and those among us who may in some sense be said to believe, are divided almost without exception into two broad cla.s.ses, Romanist and Puritan; who, but for the interference of the unbelieving portions of society, would, either of them, reduce the other sect as speedily as possible to ashes; the Romanist having always done so whenever he could, from the beginning of their separation, and the Puritan at this time holding himself in complacent expectation of the destruction of Rome by volcanic fire.

Such division as this between persons nominally of one religion, that is to say, believing in the same G.o.d, and the same Revelation, cannot but become a stumbling-block of the gravest kind to all thoughtful and far-sighted men,--a stumbling-block which they can only surmount under the most favourable circ.u.mstances of early education. Hence, nearly all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers; the best of them in doubt and misery; the worst in reckless defiance; the plurality, in plodding hesitation, doing, as well as they can, what practical work lies ready to their hands. Most of our scientific men are in this last cla.s.s; our popular authors either set themselves definitely against all religious form, pleading for simple truth and benevolence (Thackeray, d.i.c.kens), or give themselves up to bitter and fruitless statement of facts (De Balzac), or surface-painting (Scott), or careless blasphemy, sad or smiling (Byron, Beranger). Our earnest poets and deepest thinkers are doubtful and indignant (Tennyson, Carlyle); one or two, anch.o.r.ed, indeed, but anxious or weeping (Wordsworth, Mrs. Browning); and of these two, the first is not so sure of his anchor, but that now and then it drags with him, even to make him cry out,--

Great G.o.d, I had rather be A Pagan suckled in some creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.[114]

In politics, religion is now a name; in art, a hypocrisy or affectation.

Over German religious pictures the inscription, "See how Pious I am,"

can be read at a glance by any clear-sighted person. Over French and English religious pictures the inscription, "See how Impious I am," is equally legible. All sincere and modest art is, among us, profane.[115]

This faithlessness operates among us according to our tempers, producing either sadness or levity, and being the ultimate root alike of our discontents and of our wantonnesses. It is marvellous how full of contradiction it makes us: we are first dull, and seek for wild and lonely places because we have no heart for the garden; presently we recover our spirits, and build an a.s.sembly room among the mountains, because we have no reverence for the desert. I do not know if there be game on Sinai, but I am always expecting to hear of some one's shooting over it.

There is, however, another, and a more innocent root of our delight in wild scenery.