PLATE LXXXIV
THE VIA MALA
WATER COLOUR. ABOUT 1844
The first sketch is certainly sufficiently inaccurate as a representation of the physical facts of the scene, but in the finished drawing Turner permitted himself further liberties. In it ‘the whole place is altered in scale.’ The rocks on the left which should be four or five hundred feet high are made to look ‘about a thousand feet.’ ‘Next, he raises, in a still greater degree, all the mountains beyond, putting three or four ranges instead of one.’ In this way all the parts of the scene are modified, important features are eliminated at will, and facts that the artist had seen elsewhere are freely introduced. This is what we find Mr. Ruskin means when he talks about receiving ‘a true impression from the place itself, and the accurate and faithful representation of physical facts’ (Modern Painters, vol iv. p. 21.)
Now I am far from denying that Turner’s procedure was thoroughly justified, but from the ordinary standpoint of common-sense it does stand in need of justification, and it seems to me that it is not a proper way to justify it by passionately declaring that the imaginative vision of the artist does indeed give us ‘the real facts of the world’s outside aspect,’ or a faithful and unaltered copy of a portion of physical reality. Indeed I feel very strongly that this playing fast and loose with Nature and Mind (with physical fact and mental interpretation) is no gain to the cause Mr. Ruskin has at heart. In spite of all his passionate eloquence and transparent earnestness and good faith, the ordinary reader continues to regard nature as the hypostatised world of the physical sciences and as that part of the world which falls outside of mind. And when we regard nature in this way as a mechanical and external system, and declare that it is ‘God’s work,’ we can go on, as Mr. Ruskin does, to attack ‘idealisation,’ and heap contumely on such painters as Claude and Poussin, for daring to modify God’s works and for casting the shadow of their puny selves on the works of their Creator (Modern Painters, vol. i. Preface to second ed. p. xxvi.). But if we do this we must at least go on to admit that Turner and all the other great artists sinned in exactly the same way.
There is only one way, I am convinced, of working our way to a firmer and more consistent point of view, and that is to get above this naïve dualism of human and physical nature. I may even say that before we can understand the nucleus of truth in Mr. Ruskin’s own work, we must get above the unreflective realism in which the theoretical parts of his writings are steeped. Again and again, in passages of the noblest wisdom and insight, he transcends the limitations of his own thought and language, but always to sink back into the confusion inevitable to all adherents of the psychological philosophy when they come to deal with mental and moral questions.
The influence of Locke and Hume upon the form of Mr. Ruskin’s theories is obvious and avowed. He believes that ‘fact,’ ‘nature,’ and ‘truth’ are only given in sense-perception, and that therefore sensation gives us the truest and fullest knowledge of reality; his distrust of ideas is due to the belief that they distort and obscure the revelations of this unerring mirror of reality. But these assumptions do justice neither to the real independence of the physical world, nor to the claims of the mind to discover and possess absolutely reliable knowledge. And when we are dealing with such a concrete reality as pictorial art we cannot afford to do less than the fullest justice to both nature and mind. We cannot, like the practical man or the students of the physical sciences, rule out the unseen world of human feeling as irrelevant to our immediate purposes, any more than we can neglect the concrete course of phenomena, like the student of the a priori forms of knowledge. In art we have to do with nature and mind in active co-operation. We are therefore bound to treat them as two factors in a common process. We cannot have two aims in art, and we cannot separate (a) physical objects from (b) an artist’s thoughts and feelings; if we make the attempt we are inevitably driven, as we have seen Mr. Ruskin driven, to maintain that (a) is (b), and (b) (a), and then the point of our distinction seems lost. In art criticism the problem is not to separate mind from nature, but to unite them—to bring out the permanent and universal relation which binds them together. And the only way to do this is to treat them both as elements or members in the formed world of the self-conscious subject.