It may seem at first sight that Mr. Ruskin is simply distinguishing two kinds of landscape painting, such as the simply topographical from the more imaginative kind. And he does say that ‘it is possible to reach what I have stated to be the first end of art, the representation of facts, without reaching the second, the representation of thoughts.’ But the point he is chiefly concerned to emphasise is the complete dependence of the second of these aims upon the representation of facts. An artist can give us physical facts, he says, without expressing his thoughts and feelings, but no artist can express thoughts and feelings without the accurate representation of facts. This is the point, he says, that he wishes at present ‘especially to insist upon,’ and this dependence of thought upon fact, or ‘truth’ as he generally prefers to call it, forms, as I understand it, the theoretical basis upon which a large part of Mr. Ruskin’s art teaching rests.
All great art, he admits, gives us ‘the thoughts and feelings of the artist,’ but we have no standard by which we can test the value of mere thoughts and feelings; but as there is a ‘constant relation’ between an artist’s thoughts and feelings and his ‘faithfulness in representing nature,’ we have only to examine ‘the botanical or geological details’ in a landscape to ‘form a right estimate as to the respective powers and attainments’ of the artist. It is from this point of view that he calls ‘the representation of facts’ ‘the foundation of all art,’ and in the preface to The Elements of Drawing, the power ‘to copy’ natural objects ‘faithfully, and without alteration,’ is treated as equivalent to the power ‘of pictorial expression of thought.’
Now there is a point of view from which these statements could be defended, and I will endeavour a little later to indicate that point of view, but as Mr. Ruskin expresses and applies these ideas, I think they lead to confusion. Much of the welter of confusion into which the reader of Modern Painters finds himself plunged seems to me caused by the author’s persistent refusal to discriminate between physical reality and mind, between external nature and ideas. The mountains, trees, and clouds become human thoughts and feelings, not in a metaphysical sense, but as a matter of ordinary observation, and the artist is bidden to go out into the fields and draw, with the patience and precision of a geologist or land-surveyor, the visible shapes and hues of these materialised emotions and ideas.
Yet Mr. Ruskin is far too fearless and candid a thinker to attempt deliberately to falsify his evidence. He admits, when the point presents itself to him, that Turner ‘never draws accurately on the spot’; and in the wonderful analysis of Turner’s ‘Pass of Faïdo,’ in the fourth volume of Modern Painters, we are clearly shown that the artist’s representation contains hardly a single accurate and faithful statement of the physical features of the place. Yet we are assured that in some inexplicable way the picture is truer to the facts of the place than the place itself.
The artist, we are told, made ‘a few pencil scratches on a bit of thin paper’ during a momentary stoppage of the diligence in the pass. Afterwards he put a few blots of colour to these pencil scratches, possibly ‘at Bellinzona the same evening’ but ‘certainly not upon the spot.’ In the course of a few months he showed this sketch to Mr. Ruskin, who commissioned the artist to make a finished water-colour from it. (The sketch is reproduced as the frontispiece of the present volume, so the curious reader may compare it at his leisure with the reproduction of the completed drawing and Mr. Ruskin’s topographical drawing made on the spot in Modern Painters.)
PLATE LXXXIII
VILLAGE AND CASTLE ON THE RHINE
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1844